In 1907, Christine Iverson received her medical doctorate from the Department of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Michigan, US.
Two years later, the 29-year-old, who decided to serve as a missionary doctor, arrived to work at Bahrainâs âMason Memorial Hospitalâ, today known as the American Mission Hospital.
She provided care to women and children alongside her colleagues, Dr Paul Harrison and Dr Eleonor Calverley.
Her Arab patients would often ask her why a single woman would travel the seas to do this medical work. They felt she could have easily married and taken care of a husband and children there in âAmreekaâ, as they used to pronounce the word.
However, she soon met her future husband, here in Bahrain.
Anna Christine Iverson was born on January 4, 1881, in Denmark, and in 1893, when she was 12, her family immigrated to the US and settled in South Dakota.
With a religious upbringing by her devoutly Christian parents, she was determined to study hard to become a doctor and serve in remote places where modern medicine had not yet reached.
Interestingly, here in Bahrain, she met Dr Arthur Bennett who came to the hospital to serve for a while.
Like her, Dr Bennett was a missionary doctor and a surgeon, serving the Arabian Mission in Basra and Baghdad.
In 1909, when Shaikh Mubarak Al Sabah (Mubarak the Great) of Kuwait visited his friend Shaikh Khazâal, in Muáž„marah, a town in Iran today, he met Dr Bennett, and they soon became friends.
Their bond was further strengthened when Dr Bennett performed a successful eye-surgery on Shaikh Mubarakâs daughter, and also on another leading man in Kuwait, a friend of the Shaikh.
This led to Shaikh Mubarak inviting the Christian physicians of the Arabian Mission of the Reformed Church of America (RCA) to set up the American Mission Hospital in Kuwait, which served for around 60 years until it closed in 1978. It was later transformed into a museum.
Dr Bennett had lost his first wife to typhoid in 1906 in Bahrain, and was travelling between Basra, Kuwait, Bahrain, Muscat and India, serving in mission hospitals.
On one of his visits to Bahrain, he met Dr Iverson, who was also from the University of Michigan, and they had known one another. They married at Simla, India on September 25, 1911.
After marriage, she went with her husband to Basra (in current day Iraq) to work at the Lansing Memorial Hospital. She focused primarily on the medical treatment of women but also dedicated some of her time towards conducting bacteriological research.
Soon, the First World War caused huge upheavals in the region, and the Ottoman Empire began to fall, and in 1916, a group of sick Turkish soldiers were sent from a prisonersâ camp to the hospital where Dr Iverson worked.
Their sickness quickly spread to members of the hospital staff which included Dr Iversonâs husband. He had to be relocated to the central military hospital for treatment as he was very sick.
Tragically, Dr Iverson contracted typhoid fever while her husband was away. And she died on March 29, 1916, at age 35, after completing four years of medical service at Basra.
Her husband, now twice widowed, had to be taken back to the US with their only son, Matthew Cole Bennett, born in Basra in July 1912, who was only four-years-old.
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