Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?
Jeremiah 8:22
Baltimore-born Spinster Henrietta Szold, at 49, was heartbroken because a romance with a rabbinical scholar had come to an end. As balm, her mother suggested a trip to Gilead. What Zionist Szold saw in Palestine under Turkish rule in 1909 made her personal troubles seem trivial. In Jerusalem's Old City, she saw a child's trachoma-dimmed eyes covered with flies, and when she asked the mother why the flies were not brushed away, she was told: "They...