He found, however, that amid the clash of political
factions, justice was difficult to be found, and so he gave up both
the search and the post.
The estimation in which Dr Dickson was held at Tripoli, both by the
English residents and native population, cannot be better described
than by quoting entire a paragraph from a London newspaper, which
inserted a notice of his death in the year 1847: 'Letters from
Tripoli, just received, announce the death, on the 27th February,
after only four days' illness, of Dr John Dickson, a half-pay surgeon
of the British navy, who had been upwards of thirty years a resident
at Tripoli, and where, such was the extent of his gratuitous
attendance on the indigent, that the mournful event cannot but be
looked upon as a great public calamity; and happening as it did, at
the very instant the first gun announced the anniversary of the birth
of the Prophet, not a few of the Mohammedans regarded the event with a
superstitious awe. On the 1st of March, the remains of the lamented
deceased were interred in the Protestant cemetery, which is distant
about two miles from the town, escorted by a military guard of honour,
sent by order of his Excellency the Pacha, and followed not only by
every foreign consul, but by all the European residents of every
class, and by several thousands of Jews and Mohammedans; and so
anxious were many whom he had attended professionally to pay this last
tribute of respect to his memory, that they actually rose from their
beds of sickness and joined the mournful procession.
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