Three women hold children by a barracks wall. Camp Lembet, Salonica, 1922.

Item Detail

Parmelee directed the medical work at Camp Lembet, a camp of seven thousand outside Salonica, from the autumn of 1922 for the Anglo-American Relief Committee. Three women stand along a barrack wall with young children, laundry on lines in front of and behind them. Three doctors worked there when she arrived, Russian, Armenian and Greek, and no nurses she thought worth the name. Miss Hoppes ran the camp's registration and the distribution of food, milk to babies and the sick, and clothing.

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.