Ruth A. Parmelee Letters & Diaries (1919–1923)

Dr. Ruth A. Parmelee (1885–1973) was born at Trebizond on the Black Sea, the daughter of American Board missionaries. She trained as a physician at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, took a post at the Annie Tracy Riggs Memorial Hospital at Mezreh in 1914, and through the next three decades served as a physician on three of the great refugee fronts of the twentieth century: the Armenian Genocide at Harpoot, the Asia Minor refugee catastrophe at Salonica, and the German occupation of Greece in the Second World War.

The NERHS selection focuses on her Near East Relief years, 1919 through 1923. It comprises forty-five letters from her NER staging at Constantinople, her Harpoot service, her 1922 expulsion by Turkish Nationalist army/authorities, and her Salonica work with the joint American Women’s Hospitals / Near East Relief unit; ninety-eight photographs from the Harpoot mission station, Camp Lembet refugee camp at Salonica, and the AWH maternity hospital; and two diaries — one from her first Harpoot tour (1913–1916), which she kept day by day through the Armenian Genocide, and a second that covers her 1919 NER return, her 1927 AWH work at Salonica and Kokkinia, and the opening years of the Second World War in Greece. The diaries’ 1919 entries overlap directly with the early letters. The photographs document the people and places named in both.

The letters carry Parmelee’s own narrative voice and the institutional shape of her work. Diary 1 is the day-by-day Genocide witness from Harpoot in 1915. The photographs give the visual record of the relief operations she helped run. All three are intertwined; each names people and places the others record.

Her photographs are presented in a companion collection. The Ruth A. Parmelee papers are held at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.