Frank W. Peers

Frank Wagner Peers was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1891. He attended Topeka High School and Washburn College and then moved to Boston to study architecture. During the First World War, Frank and his sister Adeline Peers served together in the Harvard Ambulance Corps in France.

In February 1919, Frank and Adeline sailed from Hoboken aboard the Leviathan with the first large American relief delegation to enter the postwar Near East. Frank was one of seven bacteriologists in the party, recruited to address the medical and public-health needs of the postwar Ottoman territories. The party reached Constantinople in March 1919 via Brest, Marseilles, and Salonika. Typhus, cholera, smallpox, and trachoma were widespread in the refugee population, and laboratory diagnostics were essential to NER's medical operations.

Peers served in Turkey through 1920. The three photographic albums he compiled during this period are now held at the Houghton Library at Harvard. The albums document his work and the wider NER operation in the years immediately following the Armistice.

He returned to Boston in 1920 to study art. In September 1924, Asia magazine published his wood engraving On the Bosporus on its cover. In 1926 he studied painting at Fontainebleau before returning to New York, where he worked as a painter, illustrator, designer, and wood engraver.

Frank Wagner Peers died in New York City on April 4, 1938, at the age of forty-six.