Tawfiq Canaan was a pioneering Palestinian physician, medical researcher, ethnographer, and Palestinian nationalist. Born in Beit Jala during the rule of the Ottoman Empire, he served as a medical officer in the Ottoman army during World War I. During British rule, he served as the first President of the Palestine Arab Medical Association founded in 1944, and as the director of several Jerusalem area hospitals before, during, and after the 1948 war. Over the course of his medical career, he authored more than thirty-seven studies on topics including tropical medicine, bacteriology, malaria, tuberculosis, and health conditions in Palestine, and contributed to research that led to a cure for leprosy. Deeply interested in Palestinian folklore, popular beliefs, and superstitions, Canaan collected over 1,400 amulets and talismanic objects held to have healing and protective properties. His published analyses of these objects, and other popular folk traditions and practices, brought him recognition as an ethnographer and anthropologist. The several books and more than 50 articles he wrote in English and German serve as valuable resources to researchers of Palestinian and Middle-Eastern heritage. An outspoken public figure, he also wrote two books on the Palestine problem, reflecting his involvement in confronting British imperialism and Zionism. He was arrested by the British authorities in 1939. The last two decades of his life were lived in the shadow of several personal tragedies: the loss of his brilliant son in an accident at Jerash, the loss and destruction of his family home, and of his clinic in Jerusalem during the 1948 war. Canaan managed to re-establish his life and career in East Jerusalem under Jordanian rule. First taking sanctuary in a convent in the Old City for two years, he was appointed director of the Augusta Victoria Hospital on the Mount of Olives, where he lived with his family through his retirement until his death in 1964.
Early life
Born in the village of Beit Jala in Palestine during the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Canaan studied as a child at the Schneller School, founded by German missionaries in nearby Jerusalem. His father Bechara, who was also schooled there, founded the first Lutheran church, YMCA, and co-ed school in Beit Jala and the first Arab pastor for the German Protestant Palestine Mission. His mother, Katharina, was raised in a German orphanage in Beirut and met Bechara while working at a hospital in Jerusalem. In 1898-9, Canaan went to Beirut to study medicine at the Syrian Protestant College. Obliged to work while studying as his father died of pneumonia shortly after his arrival, he graduated with distinction in 1905. His valedictory speech, "Modern Treatment", was likely his first published piece and broached the use of serums, animal organs, and X-rays. Canaan attributed his love of, interest in, and dedication to the people, culture and land of Palestine to his upbringing and the influence of his father who regularly took the family with him on his trips around the country. In the Jerusalem Quarterly, Khaled Nashef suggests Canaan's knowledge of nature in Palestine as exhibited in writings such as "Plant-lore in Palestinian Superstition" among others were informed by these trips.
Medical career
Returning to Jerusalem from Beirut, Canaan began work in the German Deaconnesses Hospital, co-administering it with Dr. Adalbert Einsler during a senior physician’s absence in 1906. He was also sought as a manager at the German-Jewish Hospital. His first published medical article as a practicing physician, “Cerebro-Spinal Meningitis in Jerusalem", was based on studies he conducted with the director there. Between 1912-1914, Canaan travelled to Germany several times to further his knowledge of microbiology and tropical diseases. On his first trip there, he met Margot Eilender, the daughter of a German importer, who had herself been born and raised in the Middle East, and they were quickly married, having their first child Yasma that same year. They built their family home in the al-Musrarah district of Jerusalem in 1913, where their three other children were born. In that home, Canaan also opened the only Arab clinic operating in Jerusalem at the time. One of the physicians Canaan collaborated with in Germany was Hans Müch, head of a mission to Palestine whose 1913 report on tuberculosis included three research papers authored by Canaan. That same year, he was appointed director of the Malaria Branch of the InternationalHealth Bureau, a world center for medical research and microscopic examination founded by The German Society for Fighting Malaria, The Jewish Health Bureau, and The Jewish Physicians and Scientists for Improving Health in Palestine.
