13 Facts About Joseph Cochran

Joseph Cochran is credited as the founding father of Iran's first modern Western medical school, Westminster College in 1879.

Joseph Plumb Cochran was one of the eight children of Cochran's family, he was born in 1855 in Urmia, Qajar Iran.

Joseph Cochran had a happy childhood in the company of his large family and friends.

Joseph Cochran learned the local languages of Assyrian, Azerbaijani and Kurdish, in addition to English and Persian.

Joseph Cochran's father was the Reverend Joseph Gallup Cochran, and his mother, Deborah Wilson Plumb.

Joseph Cochran's parents were first-generation American missionaries sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who traveled to Iran and arrived in June 1848.

Joseph Cochran left for America as a teenager in 1868, staying in Buffalo, New York with the family of Stephen Mallory Clement, the father of Stephen Merrell Clement, who was to help finance not only Joseph Cochran's education, but his hospital.

Joseph Cochran studied medicine at New York Medical College, from where he graduated in 1876.

Joseph Cochran was assigned by the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions as a missionary physician to Persia and returned to Urmia with his wife.

Joseph Cochran resolved the problem of shortage in the local medical professionals by establishing a modern medical school, Westminster College, the first of its kind in Iran.

The historical archives of Urmia University is in the possession of documents that show that Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar and Joseph Cochran have personally signed and handed certificates to graduating students during the graduation ceremony of 1898.

Joseph Cochran died of Typhoid fever in Urmia at the age of 50, on 18 August 1905, on the second floor of his wooden house in the medical school.

Joseph Cochran's resting place is in the American Mission Graveyard in the village of Seer, located on the side of Seer Mountain, where deceased American missionaries and their families were laid to rest.