Floyd Olin Smith

Floyd Olin Smith (December 1, 1885 – August 6, 1961) was an American physician who served in the Ottoman Empire (1913–1917) and the Philippines (1918–1927) under Near East Relief and the Red Cross.

During his time in the Ottoman Empire, Smith was a caretaker of many Armenians who were victims of the Armenian genocide. He wrote extensively about the treatment of his patients and provided detailed medical assessments of each of them. Smith later worked in the Philippines for nine years, and remained in there for another thirty years. During World War II, he was captured by Japanese forces and was held as a prisoner of war. He returned to the United States where he spent the rest of his life.

Early life Floyd Smith was born on December 1, 1885, in Rowley, Iowa to parents Arthur and Jane Smith. After attaining a Bachelor of Science degree from Lenox College in 1907, Smith continued his studies at the University of Iowa where he attained his medical degree in 1911. He served as an intern at the Iowa Methodist Hospital in Des Moines. He married Bessie Heath in Hopkinton, Iowa on 4 October 1912.

Work in the Ottoman Empire Floyd Smith was sent to the Ottoman Empire by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). He sailed from Boston on 31 December 1912 and initially settled in Paris, France where he remained there for six months in order to learn French. Smith then arrived in the Ottoman Empire in 1913 where he passed medical examinations in Constantinople.

Floyd Smith managed to establish contact with the new governor in the first few weeks of his governorship. However, the governor then prohibited Smith from visiting him. Dr. Smith asserted, "Diyarbakir is an interior province with extremely few foreigners—an ideal setup to find out how to solve the Troublesome Armenian problem: Massacre and Deportation, or both combined. Talaat, Enver, and Jemal were fiends from hell itself."

Mehmed Reshid would eventually be known for organizing the annihilation of the Armenian communities of Diyarbekir, earning him the nickname the "butcher of Diyarbakir". He had persuaded himself that the native Armenian population was conspiring against the Ottoman state and he had accordingly drawn up plans for the "solution of the Armenian question." In his memoirs, Reshid recounted his first days as governor:

Over the next two months, the Armenians of the province were targeted in an extermination campaign through wholesale massacres and deportations. According to the Venezuelan officer and mercenary Rafael de Nogales, who visited the region in June 1915, Reshid had recently received a three-worded telegram from Talat Pasha to "Burn-Destroy-Kill," an order cited as official government approval of his persecution of the Christian population. Nesimi Bey and Sabit Bey, the governors of the districts of Lice and Sabit, respectively, are both suspected to have been assassinated under the express orders of Reshid for their opposition to the killings.

Anywhere between 144,000 and 157,000 Armenians, Assyrians, and other Christians, or 87 to 95% of the province's Christian population, were killed or deported during Reshid's tenure as governor of Diyarbekir.

During these events, Smith received many patients from throughout the province of Diyarbakir who suffered from deportations, torture, and massacre. He compiled a list of all the patients he treated and provided details concerning each patient. In one such instance, on 21 May 1915, Smith received a group of twenty patients who escaped the massacres of Karabash, a village near Diyarbakir. The village had a population of about seven hundred people, and consisted of a mixed population of Armenians and Assyrians.

Despite the fact that Turkish soldiers were guarding the village to prevent escapes, about twenty people managed to flee to Diyarbakir for safety and treatment.

Smith recounted that one of the more common torture techniques was the bastinado, which involves the beating the soles of a person's bare feet. One such patient, considered a "prominent Armenian", underwent seven hundred lashes to the soles of his feet. After his expulsion, the government confiscated the property of the ABCFM. In late 1924, Bessie Smith died while giving birth to their fifth child.

He officially served with the Red Cross until 1927, but continued to run his own private medical practice. He then worked for the Insular lumber Company as an industrial doctor and worked around the country. A month later, however, American forces liberated the camp in February 1945, but it was not until September that Santo Tomas finally closed and the last internees boarded a ship for the US or sought out places to live in Manila, almost completely destroyed in the Battle of Manila.

Later life After World War II, Smith briefly continued his medical practices in the Philippines. Eventually however, he settled in the United States in the late 1950s. He died in Felton, California on August 6, 1961, at the age of seventy-five and is buried at the Felton cemetery.