This photograph was taken at the Russian Hospital, a 19th-century institution that the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society established as part of the Russian Compound outside the Old City walls in “New Jerusalem,” just north of Jaffa Road. The hospital was founded in 1863 to serve pilgrims and residents—especially Russian Orthodox visitors and locals. By 1910, it could accommodate around 54 inpatients with a busy outpatient service. Before and during World War I, the building and its medical facilities were part of the complex network of hospitals and clinics serving the city’s diverse communities under Ottoman and then Colonial British Mandate rule.
Standing on the left in the photograph is Dr. Tawfiq Canaan, a prominent Palestinian physician, ethnographer, and author. Born in the city of Beit Jala (then Ottoman Palestine), he trained in medicine and served as a medical officer in the Ottoman army during World War I. After the war, he became an important figure in medical and public life in Jerusalem and beyond, serving as municipality doctor, opening the first Arab clinic in the city, and ultimately becoming the best internal diseases doctor in the country and organizing and leading the Jerusalem Arab Medical Association, among many other achievements (see Tawfiq Canaan).
The photo was taken by a photographer from the American Colony Photo Department (see The Unusual Origins of an Iconic East Jerusalem Hotel and From Utopia to Luxury: The Transformative Tale of the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem). The year 1917 was one of pivotal transition for the city and the hospital, since that was the year that the British conquered Jerusalem, and all the Ottoman military personnel who had occupied the city and the Russian Compound where the hospital was located during the war were driven out. The entire compound was transformed in different ways, becoming a center of the British Mandate administration in Palestine.