A printed card shows the Annie Tracy Riggs Hospital. Mezreh, undated.

Item Detail

Dr. Henry H. Atkinson built the hospital and dedicated it on 23 October 1910; the date and name are cut into the pediment over the porch. This card is the first in a numbered series, captioned in English, Armenian, and Ottoman Turkish; the Armenian and Ottoman lines read provisionally as Mamuret-ul-Aziz, while the English reads Mezereh. Near East Relief reopened the building in 1919, and it was the one hospital in the Anatolian interior that the organization did not keep after the evacuation.

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.