Dr. Ward and Dr. Parmelee operate on a patient. Harpoot, c. 1919-1922.

Item Detail

Near East Relief ran the Annie Tracy Riggs Memorial Hospital at Mezereh, opened in 1910. Mark Ward handled surgery, and Parmelee oversaw the women's and children's wards. She took over the whole hospital when he was ill in 1919, and filled the directorship for about seven weeks in 1921. Eight of the staff are at the table, four of them masked, with the instruments laid out beside them. Both doctors left Turkey by the spring of 1922.

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.