A hundred years before the League of Nations gave Britain the Mandate over Palestine, the emissaries of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, a Protestant organization, were the first to take root in the Holy Land. From 1820 onwards, their pioneering efforts compelled other churches, and the European powers that they represented, as well as the Jewish world, to become more engaged in the vigorous activities taking place in the Land of Israel, in order not to allow the Protestants to hold sway. Thus, the Society initiated a process that was to be of significant value in the restoration of the country when it was transformed, mainly as a result of mass Jewish immigration, from a remote and isolated region into one of the most flourishing provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The initial hopes of the Society to hasten the second advent of the Christian Messiah through the conversion of the Jews were not realized. Only a handful of the Jews in the country were caught in the Mission's net. Yet the society - by establishing the first modern institutions of medical care, education and charity - made a valuable contribution to progress in general. Although the Lond

"Modern Medicine in the Holy Land" provides an in-depth assessment of the pioneering work of British Hospitals in Palestine in the nineteenth century, and finds these institutions made great contributions to the modernization of the country. The large numbers of Europeans, spearheaded by British missionaries, who began to visit Palestine and the Levant, brought modern medical practices to the region. The driving factor for this change was the medical enterprise of the London Mission and the series of hospitals it established. This pioneering initiative led to the development of competition among the Great Powers in Palestine and by the end of the nineteenth century there were scores of medical institutions that were representative of the modern age. Using a wide selection of primary sources from both Britain and Israel, Perry and Lev bring together for the first time the history of medical service men who fought to improve the health of the inhabitants of the Holy Land under the most difficult conditions of climate and disease.