Bernard Jean Bettelheim

Bernard Jean Bettelheim (1811 to 1870) was a physician and the first Anglican missionary to Japan. Born to a Hungarian Jewish family in Pressburg, now Bratislava, he studied medicine at several universities and graduated at Padua in 1836, then practised around the Mediterranean and served as surgeon to an Ottoman military regiment at Manisa, where he converted to Anglican Christianity. After years of practice in London he joined the Loochoo Naval Mission and reached Okinawa in 1846, where he practised medicine, introduced the smallpox vaccine to the island and produced a grammar and dictionary of the Okinawan language. He later settled in the United States, served as a surgeon in the Union Army during the Civil War and died of pneumonia in 1870.