To My Brother the Doctor

...And here is a word, carrying a noble sentiment, addressed by the great educator Miss Hannah Abu al-Rus to her brother Dr. Spiridon Abu al-Rus on the occasion of his being decorated with the Order...
“The Woman's Voice,” in recording this kind word for her, offers Dr. Abu al-Rus its sincere congratulations...

How I would have liked, my brother, to declare this word of mine at the literary festival which your distinguished colleagues held for you, on the occasion of your receiving the decoration with which our exalted government has rewarded you. For this word is a debt I owe you, and the occasion is an opportunity the like of which time does not grant to one standing, as I am, upon the threshold of passing away.

My brother, your colleagues honored you, and praised the merits they knew in you and that deserve praise; but they did not know the virtues a sister has seen — qualities hidden in a brother whose company she has kept, watching his striving at close hand over a long span.

In the not-distant past, I attended a ceremony honoring a colleague of mine in teaching, who had spent forty-seven unbroken years in this profession. The speakers extolled at length the merit of the teacher, valued his efforts, and lauded his self-sacrifice in the service of the rising generation and the homeland. But (keeping to their subject) they did not mention the well-known saying: “A sound mind in a sound body.” And who, pray, preserves the soundness of the body, that it may remain a clean envelope supplying the mind with vital nourishment, so that it may stay active, thinking, generating, inventing — who but the striving physician, who has measured the great human task laid upon his shoulders and discharged it in full, with a living conscience, an exemplary integrity, and a love of the common good?

Yes, my brother: your distinguished colleagues knew that you too are that striving physician of clean conscience, who grasped the sanctity of the profession, drew from its sweet spring, and stored its secrets in his broad breast and his burning mind, with his wondrous patience for study and research, ever seeking more knowledge, so as to spread the fruits of his labors to every student who would profit. Thus, for half a century, you lightened the weight of pain upon the suffering.

Yes indeed, my brother: your colleagues knew you as a ripe physician of wide learning, with which you all but reached the summit; but they did not know you as the industrious boy who stormed learning by main force, who never knew boys’ idle play, whose only amusements were his paper and his pen — as though you were a possession of learning and of general culture, growing up as you grew; and this was in you by nature and by instinct. They did not know you as the self-made young man who cut his road with his own hand, after clearing away the steep obstacles in the path of his lofty aim.

That is why you shrank from trade, for fear of the pitfalls of material things, and turned away from office-holding, hating the shackles of the post, and went back to your book and your study, preparing alone for something that tickled your golden dreams — dreams you confided to no one but me; and so we kept the secret together...

If I forget all else, I shall not forget, my brother — I who was at your side — how you filled your crowded hours with earnest work: from your school assignments, to the private lessons you gave to some of your fellow students, to your readings in the institute’s public library, where you spent your evenings among its books and its registers, reviewing and enlarging upon what you had heard of the professors’ expositions — thereby saving the cost of books and copybooks, and sparing the household your school expenses.

And I, my brother, am indebted to you for my professional life, for you were my example in industry. How many hours of evening talk we passed, folding up the long nights in discussing the problems of the language and its thorny rules; and when I stood hesitating before a sentence, or a verse of poetry whose interpretation puzzled me, you would analyze it for me and lay open its secrets.

And as I am indebted to you for my work, so I am indebted to you for the bodily life I now live. How many times you snatched me from the claws of a certain death, and lightened the weight of pain from me, by your care and your vigils over me, and your rare brotherly love.

May God reward you on my behalf, my brother, and reward me with length of life for you, that you may carry on the medical mission to whose fulfillment you have devoted yourself.