Page 283 - ירושלים: גיליון רפואי

Dr Moshe Erlenger, later followed by Dr Aryeh Feigenbaum, took dozens of photographs
documenting the scientific work. These collections, made public for the first time in the
exhibition, present the many faces of the population of Jerusalem, whose inhabitants gaze
directly into the doctors’ camera lens. Alongside the photographs hang portraits drawn
by the artist Anna (Hanna) Ticho, the wife of the celebrated Jerusalem ophthalmologist,
Dr Abraham Ticho, who worked alongside her husband and, with her delicate strokes,
recorded for perpetuity the troubled facial features of patients visiting the clinic.

In the early twentieth century, cooperation between the different communities became
vital when the municipal authorities were called upon to address its sanitation problems.
In 1913, two delegations, one Jewish and one Christian, came from Germany to Jerusalem
to research the disease of malaria. The disease was particularly prevalent in the city’s new
neighborhoods, because of the water cisterns that had been dug there. The delegations
warned that flawed urban planning and lack of cooperation between the communities’
isolated neighborhoods had led to the formation of artificial man-made wetlands. The
water sources were home to the deadly Anopheles claviger mosquito, which transferred the
malaria disease. The water sources could only be drained if the authorities were to assume
responsibility and if there was inter-sectarian cooperation, which the researchers called
for in concluding their detailed survey in all the city’s neighborhoods – Jewish, Muslim,
and Christian.

Community care and hygiene, together with disease-prevention education, created fertile
ground for partnerships between research institutions, medical institutions, and charitable
organizations, as well as between the different sectors of the population, who were all intent
on improving the lives and health of Jerusalem’s residents. A new generation of doctors and
nurses emerged from within Jerusalem’s own community. A fine photo album given by the
Hadassah Medical Organization to Baron Edmond de Rothschild in 1925 on his eightieth
birthday documented the early years of Hadassah Hospital, which was a continuation of
the first Jewish hospital in the name of Meir Rothschild. The album, preserved in the PICA
archives, contains remarkable photographs of the new X-ray room dedicated in 1923, and
the dedication plaque in memory of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the most famous tuberculosis
patient in Jerusalem in the twentieth century, who had died a few years earlier. Another
fascinating album displayed for the first time in the exhibition is that awarded in 1927 to
Hannah Kaplan, the head nurse of Hadassah Hospital from 1920 to 1924, who served as
an “exemplar of how a certified nurse in our country should behave.” The album’s leather
cover has an embossed ivory depiction of the goddess of health, Hygeia, and its pages are
adorned with watercolor illustrations and inscriptions by Ze’ev Raban of Bezalel. The main
illustration depicts the story of the copper serpent in the desert.

Dr Moshe Wallach, a doctor and mohel, founded the Shaare Zedek Hospital and was its
director from its inauguration in 1902 until 1947. The running of the hospital, known by

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