Attendants work in the children's' ward at the Annie Tracy Riggs Memorial Hospital, Harpoot, ca. 1919–1922

Item Detail

Parmelee's medical work in the Harpoot–Mezereh district from 1919 included women's and children's care, a maternity ward and the nurses' training school. In April 1920 she wrote of bringing a beaten woman and her baby into the nursery, in the nick of time, as she put it. Six or more small children with shaven heads lie in wooden slatted cots ranged in two diagonal rows here. Four women in aprons attend them, one carrying a large white pitcher.

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.