Edward Ryan (Red Cross)

Edward W. Ryan was an American physician who spent most of his short life fighting epidemics for the Red Cross. Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1883, the youngest of four children in a working-class family, he worked in a tobacco shop and at a local newspaper before moving to New York in 1908 to study medicine at Fordham University, and he graduated in 1912. He joined the Red Cross in 1913 and was sent to Mexico during the revolution, where rebels held him as a spy and ordered his execution until the American Embassy secured his release. From 1914 he headed the American Red Cross mission in Belgrade, and in March 1915 he united the major Serbian hospitals against a typhus outbreak that killed thousands. He later worked against malaria in Greece and, between 1919 and 1922, against typhus in Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, earning Estonia's Cross of Liberty in 1920. He caught malaria in Iran and died there in 1923 of heart disease.