Andrew Jukes (surgeon)

Andrew Jukes (1774 to 1821) was a surgeon of the East India Company who spent the last years of his life in Iran. He arrived there in 1808 as a member of Sir Harford Jones's diplomatic mission. In 1813 he vaccinated children in Tehran against smallpox in the hope of stemming an epidemic, although the effort met with little success. He married Georgina Ewart in Paris in 1814 and had four children, most of whom settled in Canada, among them the surgeon Augustus Jukes, who later assisted at the trial of Louis Riel. Jukes stayed in Iran until his death in 1821, probably from Asiatic cholera. His travel companion, the Scottish writer James Baillie Fraser, tended him in his last days and oversaw his burial in the Armenian monastery of Sourp Amenaprgich in the New Julfa quarter of Isfahan. He was also an avid painter and poet, and his sketches of Persepolis and other places in Persia were last known to be held by his grandson in Manitoba.