Christmas at Salonica & AWH maternity opens, Salonica, Dec 1922
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Location

Salonica (Thessaloniki), Greece

Year

1922

Item Detail

New Year's family circular describing Christmas at the House family's Farm School (35 at the cafeteria dinner), the home celebration of the "American refugees," Mr. Birge's visit from Smyrna, the lace/handkerchief industry and a revolving fund for refugee weavers, quilt and charcoal distribution, and the "American Women's Hospitals Maternity" she is opening on 1 January 1923. Also describes the cramped compound buildings and her renewed Greek study.

Context

Dr. Ruth A. Parmelee (1885–1973) was born at Trebizond to American Board missionary parents and trained as a physician at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (1912). She practiced medicine at Harpoot from 1914 and witnessed the Armenian Genocide at first hand. In February 1919, she returned to the Near East with Near East Relief as an American Women's Hospitals physician and directed medical work at the Annie Tracy Riggs Memorial Hospital at Mezreh / Harpoot through her expulsion by Turkish Nationalist authorities in early 1922. After a short interval in Constantinople and a brief U.S. furlough, she took up relief work at Salonica in October 1922 — first as medical director of Camp Lembet, a Near East Relief refugee camp serving survivors of the Smyrna catastrophe, and from January 1923 as director of the American Women's Hospitals maternity hospital in Salonica, where she remained through the Asia Minor refugee emergency.

The letters presented here are selected from the Ruth A. Parmelee papers at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives (Box 1, Folders 2–3). They cover her Near East Relief years and the Salonica transition — the Constantinople staging of the relief unit, the Harpoot/Mezreh clinical and orphan-care work, the 1922 expulsion and exile, the Camp Lembet refugee emergency, and the first year of the AWH maternity hospital (1919–1923). They form the documentary counterpart to the Parmelee photograph selection and are organized below by the same phases of service.

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  • Holding Institution

    Hoover Institution Library and Archives

  • Attribution

    Ruth A. Parmelee papers, Box 1, Folder 2, Hoover Institution Library & Archives

  • Rights

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  • Notes

    The transition phase. Parmelee arrived at Salonica on 15 October 1922 and was immediately put in charge of the medical service at Camp Lembet, the Anglo-American Relief Committee / Near East Relief refugee camp on the city's outskirts. The November and December 1922 letters describe the scale of the influx ("perhaps a hundred thousand refugees"), the vaccination campaign at Camp Lembet (then handed off to the Greek government health department and to the American Red Cross), and the planning of the parallel AWH maternity hospital that Parmelee would open at 5 Athenon St. on 1 January 1923. The letters also introduce the lace/handkerchief industry by which Parmelee and her associates raised relief funds for refugee women, and the linked Salonica institutions — the House family's American Farm School, the Riggs family, and the wider Western Turkey Mission diaspora gathered at Salonica after the Smyrna evacuation. The Camp Lembet photographs (Hoover Box 6, Folder 4) document this phase directly.

Christmas at Salonica & AWH maternity opens, Salonica, Dec 1922