Riders halt with hooded wagons on open ground. c. 1919-1922.

Item Detail

Parmelee's letters describe supplies transported overland to the Harpoot unit: a truck convoy from the railhead at Aullou Kushla, camels from Sivas, mules from Mardin, and wagon caravans from Samsoon up the Black Sea. Armenians were forbidden to travel out of the country in 1920, Parmelee reported, and she received orders to leave on 4 June 1921, went to Sivas, and was allowed back after three weeks away. Two or three hooded wagons stand halted on stony ground with horses in harness, three riders beside them.

Context

Ruth Azneve Parmelee (1885-1973) was born in Trebizond to American missionary parents and studied with them until the family returned to the United States when she was eleven. She earned her degree at Oberlin and her medical degree at the University of Illinois, then sailed back to Turkey in May 1914 as the first woman physician to settle in the Euphrates Valley. In Harpoot she practiced obstetrics, trained nurses and cared for war orphans, and she was there through the deportations of 1915. She held the post until 1917, resumed it in 1919, and was compelled to leave in January 1922. She reached Salonica that October, opened a maternity hospital under the American Women's Hospitals, and founded Greece's first school of nursing. She stayed in the country, in one post or another, for thirty years.