Refugees wait on the quay beneath a steamer's side among bedsteads, chests, and corded bales. Salonica, c. 1922-1923.

Location

Salonica (Thessaloniki), Greece

Year

1922

Item Detail

From October 1922, Parmelee ran the American Women's Hospitals medical work at Salonica, with refugee physicians and nurses, some of whom had served with her at Harpoot. One day the bakeries were empty because seven shiploads of refugees had just come in. About four hundred thousand passed through the port and into Macedonia by April 1923.

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 5 (Salonica, 1922-1923), Hoover Institution Library & Archives

  • Rights

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  • Notes

    The Salonica work: "With the assistance of refugee physicians and nurses, some of whom had served with her at Harpoot, Dr. Parmelee organized our medical work in the Salonica District, including camp service, clinics, and a hospital of a hundred beds, with a nurses' training class." Esther Pohl Lovejoy, Certain Samaritans (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927), p. 193.

    On the scale of the influx: "When I visited Salonica in April, 1923, a stream of refugees was pouring through that port ... Approximately four hundred thousand had already been received." Same work, p. 274. Parmelee, Salonica, circular and family letters of 7 November, 3 December, 17 December and 31 December 1922 and 28 February 1923; Ruth A. Parmelee papers, Hoover Institution.

Refugees wait on the quay beneath a steamer's side among bedsteads, chests, and corded bales. Salonica, c. 1922-1923.