Fever and Thirst

The first Americans to work with the people of the Middle East were neither spies nor soldiers. They were, in fact, teachers, printers, and missionaries, of whom one was a country doctor from Utica, New York. In June of 1835, Asahel Grant, M.D., and his bride Judith sailed from Boston to heal the sick and save the world. Their destination was the town of Urmia, in northwest Iran, and their intended flock the Nestorian Christians who lived there and in the mountains of Hakkari, across the border in Ottoman Kurdistan.Into the next eight years Grant packed ten lifetimes' worth of danger, heartbreak, and exertion. He traversed deserts and glaciers, forded rivers, learned fluent Turkish and Syriac, opened schools, tended the sick and dying, confronted bandits, broke bread with thieves and murderers, and narrowly escaped death from drowning, malaria, cholera, influenza, mercury poisoning, dysentery, hypothermia, and assassination. Yet, by the time his shattered body gave out, there was no one in the mountains who did not know his name and his legend, and thirty years later Kurds, Nestorians, Jews, and Yezidis still spoke of ""Hakim Grant"" with reverence.