Andrew Davidson, , (18361918) was a Scottish physician who worked as a medical missionary, tropical disease researcher and medical facility administrator in Madagascar and Mauritius. He was an early advocate for the teaching of tropical medicine in British medical schools, and was the author of many publications, mostly related to aspects of tropical medicine. Early life Born in Kinneff, Scotland, on 22 August 1836, Andrew Davidson was the son of a shoemaker, John Davidson, and his wife, Margaret Cobban. As a teenager, he worked as an assistant bookseller in Montrose, but later studied medicine at Edinburgh University. He lived in the nearby home of the medical missionary, William Burns Thomson, who had just established a busy dispensary where he and other students helped out when their study commitments allowed. Soon after graduating, Davidson was married in Edinburgh in March 1862 to Christina McDonald, the daughter of a merchant from Laurencekirk, David McDonald. Life in Madagascar Less than a month after being married, Davidson and his wife became members of the first team from the London Missionary Society being sent to Madagascar. Europeans were expelled from the island almost three decades earlier. A new king, Radama II, had invited missionaries to return, but when Davidson arrived in the capital, Antananarivo, the majority of Madagascar’s people had no previous exposure to European medicine or its principles. One of Davidson’s colleagues would later recall that he made an instant impression with a successful cataract operation by restoring sight to a woman who had “long been blind”. Locals believing he could work miracles turned up a few days later outside his home with a corpse, hoping he could bring a deceased person back to life, but then realised his limitations. Davidson was soon running a busy clinic in Antananarivo, opening a dispensary for two hours every day then visiting the sick in their homes. In a letter to William Burns Thomson, he said that although French doctors had tried to introduce themselves to the King, he’d been appointed Court Physician, and been given the Order of Radama “for my successful treatment of his son”. By early 1864, Davidson had received royal permission to begin building Madagascar’s first hospital, not far from his home in the capital. After a trip back to Britain at end of 1866, Davidson cut his ties with the LMS but with more funding provided through Thomson he returned to Madagascar