Two children in rags stand at a dry-stone wall. Harpoot, c. 1919-1922.

Location

Harpoot (Kharpert), Turkey

Year

c. 1919–1922

Item Detail

Near East Relief kept its Harpoot children in families of about a hundred, each under a mairig, or house mother. Parmelee spent the summer of 1920 looking for children who were wholly alone to match with sponsors in America. Two children stand against a dry-stone wall, both barefoot and in shredded layered rags, the one on the right very thin.

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.

View in the Digital Archive

  • Holding Institution

    Hoover Institution Library and Archives

  • External Link
    https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt596nf1c5/

  • Attribution

    Ruth A. Parmelee papers, Box 6, Folder 3 (Harpoot, Turkey, 1914-1922), Hoover Institution Library & Archives

  • Rights

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  • Notes

    A similar wall appears behind the child in 36907; the same sitting remains a hypothesis. Lovejoy to Parmelee, 26 November 1919, Records of the American Women's Hospitals, Acc. 144, Box 9, Folder 73, Legacy Center, Drexel University College of Medicine. Quoted by Virginia Metaxas, "Working with the Sources: The American Women's Hospitals in the Near East," Drexel Legacy Center; the original letter was not consulted.

    Orphanage families: "Each orphanage has about one hundred children under the direct supervision of a native mother and a big sister, generally a young girl who is a graduate of the American school." Mark H. Ward, "Harpoot's Large Family of Near East Children," Near East Relief II:43, 30 October 1920, p. 2.

    Intake and detention home: "During August we took in over 850 new orphans and women from Turkish homes ... These new ones are placed in the detention home, where they are cleansed." Parmelee, Missionary Herald CXVI:1 (January 1920), p. 26.

Two children in rags stand at a dry-stone wall. Harpoot, c. 1919-1922.