John Wortabet

Born in Aleppo in 1827, John Wortabet became a doctor, educator, and author whose career was closely tied to Beirut. He was part of the early faculty of the Syrian Protestant College, the institution that later became the American University of Beirut, and was remembered there as an Armenian from Aleppo who earned his medical degree in the United States.

Wortabet taught medicine and anatomy and also worked as a physician in Beirut. Alongside his medical work, he wrote and translated books, including an Arabic version of Gray's Anatomy. He is also associated with an Arabic-English and English-Arabic dictionary and with Arabian Wisdom, a collection of translated Arabic sayings published after his lifetime.

That mix of science, language, and cultural translation makes his career especially interesting today. He seems to have been one of those scholars who moved easily between worlds, helping students study modern medicine while also preserving and sharing the richness of Arabic learning and expression. He died in 1908.