Shepard, Lorrin A(ndrews) (b. March 24, 1890, Antep - d July 16, 1983, Haverhill, Massachusetts, USA), chief physician of the American Hospital from 1927 to 1957. Having dedicated his whole life to making the American Hospital the best health and treatment center in Istanbul, he was familiarly known as Mr. American Hospital.
His father Dr. Fred D. A. Shepard (1855-1915) was a surgeon at the Antep American Hospital. An 1881 medical graduate of the University of Michigan, Dr. Fred D. A. Shepard served at the Antep American Hospital from 1882 until his death from typhus in 1915.
Lorrin A. Shepard’s mother Dr. Fanny Andrews A. Shepard (1856-1920) was also a physician, born to a missionary family in Hawaii. After obtaining her degree in medicine from the University of Michigan in 1882, she came to Turkey with her husband Dr. Fred D. A. Shepard. As a woman, however, she was not allowed to practice as a physician in the Ottoman Empire. She raised three children as she worked as a nurse, midwife and paediatric nurse at the Antep American Hospital and founded a lace and sewing workshop to help the widows and orphans of Antep.
Lorrin A. Shepard visited the USA every three or four years with his parents between 1890 and 1908 and started school in Antep. He later moved in with his paternal aunt to attend the New Jersey High School in Orange (1908-10) and finished as top of his year. He studied science at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (1910-14) and medicine at Columbia University (1914-18). He served at the Presbyterian Hospital of New York as general practitioner (1918-19). He got married in 1919, and at the wedding ceremony he and his wife were commissioned by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. That same year he was appointed as physician to the Antep American Hospital in place of his father who had died in 1915. He was forced to leave in 1926 due to a dispute.
Dr. Shepard completed his surgical residency at the Bellevue Hospital, New York (1926-27) and was appointed as chief physician of the American Hospital in Istanbul in 1927. In 1934, he appealed to American donors to raise funds for the hospital’s first building in Nişantaşı, whose planning, fundraising and construction he supervised in 1939. He contributed to the design of the Admiral Bristol Nursing School in 1949, and oversaw its construction.
In 1957, Dr. Shepard retired from the American Hospital and returned to the USA, where he was appointed as director of the Yale University Foreign Students Centre in the same year. He also prepared the library catalog of the Ottoman Manuscripts Collection of the university. In 1959 he moved to the family home in Boothbay, Maine, and died at the Union Mission Care Home in Haverhill, Massachusetts on July 16, 1983.