Emin Pasha

Emin Pasha, born Isaak Eduard Schnitzer in 1840 and dead in 1892, was an Ottoman physician of German Jewish origin, a naturalist, and governor of the Egyptian province of Equatoria on the upper Nile. He was born in Oppeln in Silesia into a middle-class German Jewish family and qualified as a physician in 1864 after studying at Breslau, Königsberg and Berlin, but was disqualified from practice and left Germany for Constantinople. He was soon practising medicine at Antivari in Montenegro, served as the port's quarantine officer until 1870, and then joined the staff of Ismail Hakki Pasha, governor of northern Albania. From December 1875 he lived in Khartoum, took the name Mehemet Emin, started a medical practice and collected plant, animal and bird specimens, many of which he sent to museums in Europe. In 1876 Charles George Gordon, then governor of Egyptian Equatoria, invited him to be chief medical officer of the province. The Ottoman Empire conferred the title Pasha on him in 1886.