Travels Through the Empire of Morocco

A rare glimpse into early 19th-century Morocco through English eyes. John Buffa, a British physician stationed at Gibraltar, was summoned across the straits to attend a sick governor in Larache. Instead, he found himself drawn into an extended residency in Tangiers and the surrounding empire, where he practiced medicine, observed customs that bewildered and fascinated him, and eventually secured an audience with the Emperor himself. Buffa writes with the particular eyes of an outsider granted unusual access: he catalogs the rhythms of Moroccan daily life, the elaborate hospitality rituals, the political chess game between Britain and a fiercely independent North African kingdom. But the narrative carries a second thread equally gripping to modern readers: Buffa's own battle against bureaucratic enemies within the Army Medical Board, who plotted against him even as he tended the sick in a foreign land. For anyone curious about early Western encounters with the Islamic world, or the birth of British imperial medical practice, this is an indispensable primary source.