About: Carl K. Becker

Carl K. Becker (1894–1990) was an American doctor and missionary. He left a profitable medical practice in Boyertown, Pennsylvania to join the Africa Inland Mission in 1929. By 1934 he had set up his own mission station in the Ituri Rainforest in the Belgian Congo. Becker was medical resident of the mission's hospital, carried out more than 3,000 operations and delivered hundreds of babies each year. He was the first in Equatorial Africa to use electric shock therapy for the treatment of psychiatric disorders and his leprosy village attracted specialists from across the world. He was briefly evacuated during the 1964 Simba rebellion and returned to the United States upon his retirement in 1976.