and began an intensive campaign of educating local medical missionary students in the use of chemical equipment and prepared medical texts in Malagasy, including works on pharmacy, chemistry and midwifery. Both Davidson and Thomson saw the training of medical students as an extension of their missionary work, and their plans were advanced when Queen Ranavalona II became monarch of Madagascar in 1868. According to Thomson, Davidson helped to encourage the Queen and thousands of her people to convert to Christianity. She gave Davidson permission to open the Malagasy Medical Mission College, where he taught physiology, while others taught anatomy, English, chemistry, “natural philosophy”, algebra and geometry and “Bible knowledge”. Three of Davidson’s students were brought to Edinburgh by Thomson. One died before passing his preliminary examination, but the other two went home as the first Madagascan medical practitioners with internationally-recognised qualifications. With the help of a nurse sent from Scotland by Thomson, by 1874 Davidson had also trained two batches of women as “missionary nurses” or midwives. “I know of no mission that has exerted so great an influence on the destinies of a nation as the Medical Mission, under Dr Davidson, in Madagascar,” Thomson later reflected. As well as practising medicine and teaching in Madagascar, Davidson would also devote time to writing scholarly articles. One related to an outbreak of “choreomania” or a “dancing disease” which swept through Madagascar in 1863, affecting large numbers of people and causing widespread turmoil. In 1864, he wrote “Tubercular leprosy in Madagascar” for the Edinburgh Medical Journal. In 1867, he wrote an article on a recently-abolished Madagascan practice of “trial by poisoning”. Davidson’s time in Madagascar would come to an end in 1876 after a dispute with the Prime Minister, Rainilaiarivony. According to fellow British missionary, John Alden Houlder, the dispute apparently began because Rainilaiarivony “felt aggrieved because of some real or fancied neglect of the Queen or himself”. The already “thoroughly angry” Prime Minister and his friends then became “furious” when Davidson backed moves to make wealthy families pay something for previously free medical services. Rainilaiarivony called a mass meeting, told the thousands of people who attended to boycott Davidson, took away his students and assistants, and placed spies around his house, making it “positively dangerous” for any local or foreigner to go near him. “It was, however, all to no purpose,” Houlder recorded. “The doctor never budged an inch, nor showed