Dr. Clarence D. Ussher

Clarence Douglas Ussher (1870–1955) was the physician of the American Board mission at Van, where he had served since 1898. He was the only doctor in the city through the 1915 siege, when Turkish forces massacred the Armenians of Van vilayet and the city's Armenians held out for a month. His fifty-bed hospital took in a hundred and sixty-seven patients. "Working from before sunrise till midnight day after day," he wrote, "I could not attend all who needed me." Typhus reached the refugees in late June. It killed his wife, Elizabeth Barrows Ussher, on July 14, and nearly killed him; he left Van on August 3, 1915, carried out in a horse litter with the mission party, and reached Tiflis (Tbilisi) by way of Igdir. His account of the siege, published in 1917, remains one of the fullest eyewitness records of the destruction of Armenian Van.

Back in the United States on furlough, Ussher spent 1917 and 1918 on the lecture circuit for the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, speaking for the relief campaign across the country. He returned to the field for Near East Relief and was the organization's man at Erivan (Yerevan) around 1920 and 1921, one of the station heads under Ernest Yarrow's Caucasus directorship. In December 1920, as Soviet forces took Armenia, he cabled New York from the Armenian capital that the new government "shows great respect. Promises assistance and to give guarantees against requisition Near East supplies." He remained in the Caucasus until the early 1920s and died at Santa Monica, California, in 1955.