Page:Thirty-five years in the East.djvu/46

6 earthquake, which caused so many disasters; the village called Jisershol, on the river (between Latachia and Aleppo ), was entirely destroyed. Following the Syrian coast, I crossed Latachia, Tripoli, Beyrout, Seida, Sur, Acre,Nazareth, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, and visited the Holy Sepulchre, &;c., in the autumn of the year 1819. From Jaffa I embarked for Damietta and went up the Nile as far as Cairo. At that period an Armenian from Tocat, named Giovanni Bozzari, enjoyed the title of First Physician, under the superintendence of whom I obtained employment in the fortress. Giovanni Bozzari pursued his medical studies at Constantinople, in the house of a Venetian doctor named Bozzari. Availing himself of the name of his professor, when in Egypt, Mahomed Ali, at that time a Binbashi (chief of 1,000 men), protected him, as he had been welh advised by Bozzari when he applied for his assistance. Subsequently, when Mahomed Ali was promoted to the dignity of a Pasha, Bozzari was invested with the title of privycounsellor, and occupied at the same time the post of physician in ordinary : Cui fortuna favet, sponsa petita manet!

At that period ( 1820 — 1821) Mahomed Ali despatched an army to Upper Egypt, under the command of his second son, Ismail Pasha ; his elder son, Tossoon Pasha,having died by the plague some years previous. I was one of the first among the physicians engaged for that expedition ; but whilst they were preparing for the march, the plague broke out, which induced me to give up that fatiguing and perilous journey, cede my post to another, and go back to Syria. Some time after, I learned that the expedition miscarried, that none of those ten or twelve physi- cians who accompanied the army had returned, and that Ismail Pasha himself had been massacred.

At Cairo I was so fortunate as to be very successful in my cures. Among others, 1 attended a merchant of Constantinople, a Greek, who was greatly afflicted with the stone during a period of forty years, so that he was willing to undergo an operation. I cured him of his complaint by administering to him ( for a period of six weeks ) diluted