Dr. Parmelee holds five infants for the camera. Harpoot, c. 1919-1922.

Item Detail

Near East Relief ran the Annie Tracy Riggs Memorial Hospital at Mezereh, opened in 1910. Parmelee opened the maternity ward in October 1919 and wrote in December 1921 of heavy infant mortality in it. She sits in a wicker armchair with five infants across her arms and lap. She sent hospital photographs home to Ohio that same winter and asked her correspondents to circulate 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.