CHRISTIAN EDMUND BECKER. - Member of the Congregation of the Salvatorians, first Apostolic Prefect of Assam, and later founder of the Medical-Missionary Institute in Würzburg. Born on 22 Oct. 1875 in Elsoff, near Frankfurt am Main; died in Würzburg on 30 Mar. 1937. He completed his philosophical and theological studies in Rome, where he was ordained priest in 1898. He served as professor and later rector of the studentate in Merano. In 1905 he was appointed Apostolic Prefect of Assam, a position he held until the First World War (1914–18), after which, along with all his missionaries, he was interned and then expelled from India (1916). As a return to India was deemed impossible, he resigned from his prefecture in 1921. Around that time, German Catholics took a keen interest in the problem of healthcare in the missions, and B. was invited to apply his experience to this cause. In 1921 he published his pamphlet *Ärztliche Fürsorge in den Missionsländern*; then, with the support of missionary orders and papal agencies in Germany, in 1922 he founded the Medical-Missionary Institute in Würzburg. In 1924 he delivered lectures on missiology at the University of Würzburg, and in 1928 he was appointed honorary full professor at the same university.
B. also contributed to the missionary cause through his writing. In 1923 he published the history of his mission (*Im Stromtal des Brahmaputra*, Munich; 2nd ed., Aachen, 1927); in 1921 a study on the caste problem in India (*Indisches Kastensessen und christliche Mission*, Aachen); and he also wrote several missionary biographies. Later he addressed medical-missionary topics, both in the journal of his institute (*Fahrbuch für missionsärztliche Fürsorge*), beginning in 1924, and in the monograph *Missionsärztliche Kulturarbeit* (Würzburg, 1928).
Giovanni B. Tragella