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

Item Detail

The date and the name are cut into the pediment over the porch: 1910, and the hospital's own. 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. 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 gives Mezereh. Four horse-drawn carriages stand on the bare ground in front, with eight or so people on the porch steps.

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.