Ruth A. Parmelee Photographs (ca. 1910–1923)

In the summer of 1919, Dr. Ruth A. Parmelee returned to Harpoot (Kharpert), where she had practiced medicine from 1914 to 1917 and witnessed the Armenian Genocide. Armenian colleagues at Euphrates College had been arrested, deported, and killed. The collection begins with two prewar images: a postcard of the Annie Tracy Riggs Memorial Hospital at Mezreh, dating from about 1910, and a portrait of the college’s Armenian professors in 1912.

Parmelee returned as an American Women’s Hospitals physician working with the American Committee for Relief in the Near East, later Near East Relief. At the hospital, she directed the women’s clinic, maternity service, nurse-training program, and medical care for the city’s orphanages. Photographs show an operation in progress, an infants’ ward, and a nurse examining a boy. Other scenes record food being stirred in large cauldrons and a wagon convoy on the Harpoot road.

In April 1922, Turkish Nationalist authorities compelled Parmelee to leave Harpoot. That autumn, under American Women’s Hospitals, she organized medical services at Camp Lembet for the Anglo-American Relief Committee. The camp housed seven thousand refugees outside Salonica (Thessaloniki) as survivors of the Smyrna catastrophe reached Greece. Photographs from Salonica show a ship crowded with refugees, families camped in the streets, and shelters partitioned with blankets. At Camp Lembet, mothers were photographed with their infants. On January 1, 1923, Parmelee opened the American Women’s Hospitals maternity hospital in Salonica.

Parmelee’s letters and diaries are presented in a companion collection, with her accounts of medical work at Harpoot, her departure in 1922, and the refugee emergency at Salonica.

The Ruth A. Parmelee papers are held at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.