Antique Historical Arabian Dagger Belonging to a Mission Doctor in 1923

Description

This antique dagger is in great condition and the blade is still sharp and shiny. It belonged to Dr. Louis Dame, an American doctor who served in Riyadh during 'The Arabian Mission'.
The U.S.-Saudi relationship may have been founded on money, but for Ibn Saud it always had a personal and even sentimental dimension. The first Americans he met were Christian medical missionaries based on the island of Bahrain. These doctors and nurses from the Reformed Church in America treated his soldiers on several occasions after 1911, and came across from the island quite regularly—their painstaking archives record the treatment of nearly three hundred thousand mainland patients in the course of Abdul Aziz’s reign. Thirty-five hundred of these patients required surgery, including the king himself, who summoned Dr. Louis Dame urgently to Riyadh in 1923 to operate on an alarming and painful “cellulitis of the face” that had caused one of his eyes to swell to the size of a baseball.
Dr. Dame, who, like all the mission doctors, spoke Arabic, lanced the inflammation and solicitously attended the king and other members of the royal family for nearly a week. He was particularly caring toward the king’s aging father, Abdul-Rahman. Grateful and much impressed, Abdul Aziz insisted that the Reformed Church’s medical facilities should be matched and expanded by Socal when the oil company started work in the Eastern Province, and in 1936 Dr. Dame was recruited to help set up the service.