Gordon Taylor, ’65
Fever and Thirst: Dr. Grant and the Christian Tribes of Kurdistan, by
Gordon Taylor, ’65. Hardcover,
350 pages, Academy Chicago Publishers, November, 2005.
Taylor, a Seattle-based author, developed a fascination for the Turkish
province of Hakkari while he was posted to Ankara as a Peace Corps volunteer
in 1965. In the early 1990s, he came across a book titled Dr. Grant and the
Mountain
Nestorians, published in 1853. Familiar with the name Asahel Grant from his studies
of the area, Taylor began the research that culminated, years later, in this
biography, for which the foreword was written by William Chaney, professor emeritus
of history.
In June 1835, Asahel Grant, M.D., sailed from Boston with his bride, Judith,
to heal the sick and save the world. Their destination: the town of Urmia, in
northwest Iran. Their intended flock: the Nestorian Christians who lived there
and in the mountains of Hakkari, across the border in Turkish Kurdistan.
Into the next eight years Grant packed ten lifetimes’ worth of danger,
traversing deserts and glaciers; tending the sick; breaking bread with thieves
and murderers; and narrowly escaping death from drowning, disease, and assassination.
By 1840 he had lost Judith and two daughters to disease. Yet, by the time he
died, at age 36, everyone in the mountains knew his name, and 30 years later,
Muslims, Christians, and Jews still spoke of “Hakim Grant” with reverence.
Grant was a walking contradiction — a saint who neglected his children,
a missionary who “converted” only Christians, a doctor who poisoned
himself with his own medicine, an apolitical man whose very existence bristled
with political import. In 1841, amid this whirlwind life, he became a successful
author with his book The Nestorians; or, The Lost Tribes. Grant is buried in
Mosul, Iraq, where he died in 1844.
Lawrence alumna Phoebe J. Grant, ’77, of Chicago, is the great-great-granddaughter
of Dr. Asahel Grant.
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