She was born on 1 October 1866 as the fourth child to Chief Bedel of the ETH Zurich, Karl Joseph Eduard Zürcher, and Anna-Barbara Hirt.
[3] Being a half-orphan, she and her brother came into the care of a legal guardian who sent them to an orphanage[3] as her mother couldn't be the head of the family as a woman.
[4] By 1886, she began to study medicine at the University of Zurich and was the fifth woman who registered for the state exam to become a medic in 1891.
[8] She returned to focus on her studies and obtained her Doctorate with a dissertation on Joan d'Arc from a psychological and psychopathological point of view in 1895.
[11] It was in Dresden where she came into contact with Alfred Ilg, a Swiss advisor to the Abyssinian King Menilek who wanted to recruit Zürcher as a medic for the noblewomen of Addis Abeba.
[10] At about the same time, she received a call from the German Orientalist Johannes Lepsius,[12][13] who encouraged her to set up a clinic for the Armenians in Urfa.
[12] After some negotiations, she was allowed to enter the Ottoman Empire as a doctor under the precondition that she would dress as a man for as long she was not in an exclusively female environment after she had passed Aleppo on her way to Urfa.
[18] Her stay in Urfa was cut short, as she was prohibited from continuing her work as a medic by the Ottoman authorities.
[21] However, her salary depended on what her clients could give, how it was common for the Ottoman Empire doctors, and that Henry's employment provided the family with a calculable income, and she agreed to move to Haifa.
In October 1915, her husband had to liquidate the local branch of the Deutsche Palästina-Bank in Nablus due to the outbreak of World War I.