Jakob Künzler

Jakob Künzler (1871 to 1949) was a Swiss mission doctor and relief worker in Urfa in the Ottoman Empire. Born in Hundwil, he worked as a carpenter, trained in Basel as an evangelical deacon and nurse, and travelled to Urfa in 1899. There he went on studying medicine until he worked as an independent operating surgeon, and in 1905 he married Elizabeth Bender. He was an eyewitness to the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1917, which he described in his book In the Land of Blood and Tears, and he helped provide for thousands of Armenian orphans despite mortal danger. After closing his hospital in October 1922 he moved with his family to Ghazir near Beirut, where he later opened a centre for orphans, then set up a settlement for Armenian widows in Beirut and a lung sanatorium at Azounieh. He died at Ghazir in Lebanon in 1949.