Her father, Siegfried Hoff (ca.1845-1896), had been born into a prosperous German Jewish family, and had emigrated to the United States, taking US citizenship.
However, he had left the United States and, from the perspective of his respectable brother Leopold who lived near Hamburg and ran the family manufacturing business, Siegfried had "disappeared" into czarist Russia where he supported himself as a businessman.
The family business had been established by Ida's grandfather, Johann Hoff, and involved manufacturing a Malt Extract health tonic which sold well in the German speaking world.
As a child Ida Hoff grew up in circumstances of some material comfort, possibly reflecting her father's success as a health tonic salesman.
She had been born in Daugavpils which today is in Latvia but at that time would have been regarded as a prosperous city to the south of St. Petersburg in the western part of the Russian Empire.
It was possibly a reflection of the stigma surrounding divorce that later Ida would explain that she had grown up in a one-parent family in the context of her father's early death, which was not completely untrue.
The czarist regime in Russia was becoming increasingly despotic and paranoid, persecuting opponents where it identified them, placing Jews under pressure and blocking the way to higher education for women.
On the occasion of her first application, in 1893, the city authorities had accepted that she was not involved in politics, but had nevertheless determined that having lived in Switzerland for six years was insufficient to justify citizenship.
By the time she passed her Matura (school final exams) in 1899 Ida Hoff was one of just two girls in her class at the Bern Literary Gymnasium ("Berner Literatur-Gymnasium'").
[1] The small but determined group of female students used to meet together each Saturday at the homely "Daheim Women's Restaurant" in Bern's Zeughausgasse (literally: "Armoury Alley") to analyse and bemoan examples of anti-feminism.
[1] In later life Ida Hoff liked to recall an experience she had during her time in Berlin which highlighted just how unfamiliar people found the idea of a woman doctor during the early years of the twentieth century in Europe.
[1] Ida Hoff passed her national qualifying exams in Summer 1905 and arranged to move to Berlin in order to obtain experience as a medical assistant at the Moabit Hospital there.
It was also in Berlin, at the Women's Clinic of the Charité teaching hospital, that she worked on her dissertation "Beitrag zur Histologie der Schwangerschaft im rudimentären Nebenhorn", a gynaecological study on an aspect of pregnancy: this earned her a doctorate from Bern in 1906.
She inspired confidence with her sound, always up to date medical knowledge, a strong sense of responsibility, a certain imperturbable calmness of approach and a powerful determination to do good.
The occasion was given added piquancy by the fact that it was in this same school director's office that, as a child she had been reprimanded twenty years earlier on account of her "excessively high spirited conduct".
Reflecting the endemic medical problems of the time and place, she was involved in struggles against several major epidemics of tuberculosis, flu and scarlet fever.
The delighted all-female organising team, having captured popular attention, also dragged a giant model of a snail round Bern in order to illustrate the speed with which their campaign for women to have the chance to vote was progressing.
[1] More than a decade after her mother's death, and more than one year after establishing herself as a self-employed medical practitioner, Ida Hoff moved to larger premises in the Amthausgasse in the heart of the old city.
Doctor Hoff hugely admired the philosopher's scholarship, frequent flashes of intellectual brilliance and endless curiosity driven academic research.
On the subject of marriage, in a discussion that apparently referenced her own intensively lived life, Ida Hoff on one occasion remarked, "With a man, I really never would know where I should start."
When they had free time the two women liked to drive in the mountain road network being constructed in the countryside towards Interlaken to the east and the Lake of Geneva to the south.
Hoff had at one stage wanted to study Biology, and was enthusiastic about the natural splendours of the mountain roads, alongside which "no flower could hide in the undergrowth".
With his wife, Heidi, he liked to accompany Hoff and Tumarkin on their Sunday afternoon drives to favourite walking locations such as the Schwarzsee and nearby Fribourg.
The city had been the scene of ferocious antisemitic pogroms at the start of the twentieth century, and the coming to power in Germany of the Hitler government paved the way for race-based persecution and slaughter in the 1940s as the German and Soviet armies fought for control over the Bessarabia region.
1845-1896) had emigrated, first to the United States and later to the Russian empire, his elder brother Leopold Hoff had remained in Hamburg and managed the family firm.
On that occasion she had made a deep impression on her cousin Clara, both on account of her "unconventional lifestyle" and because of the surgical skill with which she dissected a roast chicken.
As their friend and confidant Georgine Gerhard recalled after Hoff's death, "that such horrors could be inflicted on the Jews without a storm of indignation bursting out across the entire world weighed on them heavily.
Ida was also deeply unsettled by the less than laudable reactions of the Swiss authorities in dealing with holocaust refugees, and some of the manifestations of antisemitism within Switzerland.
Despite the care Hoff was able to lavish on her dying friend, eventually Tumarkin, now aged 75, had to be transferred to the "Siloah Diakonissenhaus" in Gümligen, on the south side of the city in the direction of Thun.
On the afternoon of 4 August 1952, by now aged 72, her heart began to fail more completely, and she died early the next morning, a couple of days before the first anniversary of Anna's death.