He achieved preparatory education at the Bishop Gobat School (1901–1905) and the English College (1907–1909) in Jerusalem. This left an indelible mark on him. His assertiveness, honesty, discipline, and austerity most probably derived from his early Scottish high school teachers in Jerusalem, where he earned the Gibbon Memorial Prize in July 1906. He graduated with a Medical Doctor (MD) degree from the Syrian Protestant College (SPC) in 1913. Founded in 1866 by the American missionaries in Beirut (Lebanon), the SPC was renamed in 1920 as the American University of Beirut. For seven years after graduation (1913–1919), he practiced general medicine and public health, and taught the basic medical sciences at SPC. In 1919, he was nominated physician in charge of the Mental Disease Hospital at Asfuriyeh. When the U.S. King-Crane Commission (created by President Woodrow Wilson to poll public opinion in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) arrived in Beirut, he became its physician and interpreter.