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Near East hospitals count 6,928 beds. NER Weekly, 28 Jan 1921.
Location
Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey
Year
1921
Item Detail
A census of the hospitals puts Near East Relief's capacity at 6,928 beds, 1,108 of them in the Anatolia area, 290 in the Beirut area and 5,530 across the forty-three Caucasus hospitals as of the previous summer. The Anatolia clinics treated 58,068 patients in a single month. The issue opens with a gift of fifty lira from the Italian colony at Adana, sent after the Near East hospital there cared for a stranded Italian, and goes on to forty of the largest Adana orphan boys building 400 meters of drainage ditch for the town under a French engineer.
Context
The Near East Relief Weekly Bulletin was a four-page weekly printed in Constantinople for the organization's own staff. It continued The Acorne, the bulletin of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East, and took the new title with Vol. II, No. 42 on 23 October 1920, when the organization itself was renamed Near East Relief.
Because it was written for people already in the field and not for donors at home, the Weekly is plainer than anything Near East Relief printed in America. Station reports give the numbers (e.g., children fed, beds occupied, pairs of shoes made, tons landed at Batoum) and the personnel notes record who arrived, who transferred, who married and who died.
The run covers the fall of Kars, the landing of Russian refugees in Constantinople in the winter of 1920, the famine in Armenia through 1921 and 1922, and the French withdrawal from Cilicia.
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Holding Institution
Columbia University Library
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External Link
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Attribution
Digitized by Columbia University Libraries; available through HathiTrust (Public Domain).
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Rights
No known copyright restrictions. Based on available information, NERHS is not aware of copyright restrictions on this material. Items are presented for non-commercial research and educational use. Users are responsible for determining rights status and compliance with applicable law. If you believe you hold rights in this material or have information about rights holders not currently reflected, please contact [email protected].
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Notes
Masthead: 'Near East Relief. Vol. III. No. 4. 25 Rue Taxim, Pera, Constantinople. January 28, 1921.'
Most of the people described in these pages were survivors of the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians and of the killing and deportation of Greeks and Assyrians in the same years. The bulletin does not use the word "Genocide," which was not coined until 1944. Its writers say "the deportations", "the massacres", or simply "the troubles", and often say nothing at all about how a child came to be an orphan. Where an issue documents the events or their aftermath, the record indicates this in the Subject field. The period's own vocabulary is kept in the original article titles and in quoted phrases.
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Document Contents
C. Massa sends 50 lira from Adana's Italian colony after the Near East Hospital cares for a stranded Italian; a hospital census counts 1,108 beds in Anatolia, 290 in the Beirut area and 5,530 in the Caucasus; J. P. Coombs reports on refugees and hospitals at Derindje and Ismid; forty Adana orphan boys construct 400 meters of drainage ditch; a telegram records Mark H. Ward's arrival at Harpoot; a Methodist Episcopal gift supports the Constantinople trachoma hospital under Emma D. Cushman and Russell T. Uhls; Elizabeth S. Webb reports 176 girls in the Adana orphanage; Mrs. Mark L. Bristol raises money for Russian refugees; J. E. Van Toor travels by armored train through Cilicia to plan work at Deurt Yol and Euzerli; personnel notices close the issue.