Collections
Morgenthau, the League loan & the exchange, Dec 1923
Location
Salonica (Thessaloniki), Greece
Year
1923
Item Detail
Typed family letter describing the hospital's new twice-monthly financial reporting and cost-accounting, Thanksgiving at the Mission girls' school, the lace-goods sale before Christmas, recent births (English, Austrian, American), and Mrs. Getchell's bout of malaria. The latter half turns to Henry Morgenthau's visit, the League loan raising the drachma, and the Greek-Turkish population exchange — the Turks now refugees waiting in town, "the second winter of refugee-ism."
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
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Attribution
Ruth A. Parmelee papers, Box 1, Folder 3, Hoover Institution Library & Archives
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Rights
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Notes
The first full year of the AWH maternity hospital at 5 Athenon St., Salonica, running through the broader Asia Minor refugee emergency. The 1923 letters describe the daily clinical work (forty-plus births a month at peak; ward crowding; head-nurse succession), the recruitment of pupil-nurses from refugee girls of the Marsovan and Smyrna mission schools, cooperation with the Greek Patriotic League and a network of cooperating bodies (NER, the Mount Olympus monastery-farm orphanage, the American Farm School, the AWH Athens office under Dr. Mabel Elliott and Dr. Esther Lovejoy), the persistent exchange-rate pressure on relief budgets after the drachma collapse, the August rest at Chamkoria in Bulgaria with the Riggs and Getchell families, and a vivid first-hand account of the October 1923 royalist counter-revolution in Macedonia. The Western Turkey Mission formally voted in 1923 to extend Parmelee's loan to AWH — her institutional posture is American Board missionary, AWH-employed, cooperating with NER on the ground. The closing items include the December 1923 letter on the League loan and the Greek-Turkish population exchange, and a third-person abstract recording her January 1924 inspection trip with the Greek War Relief Committee's Athens distribution committee.