A relief worker and a driver stand at a decorated araba with tasseled fringes. c. 1919-1922.

Item Detail

The araba, a wagon with a hooped canopy, was how the unit traveled the plain: workers finishing a year's service in February 1920 expected to go out by araba, or on horseback if storms prevented it. Parmelee traveled this way to the out-stations and, in May 1920, went sixteen days to Arabkir and Egin, two of them on horseback.

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.