Dr. Ruth Parmelee

Ruth Azniv Parmelee was born in Trebizond, Ottoman Turkey, in 1885 to American missionary parents. After graduating from Oberlin College and earning a medical degree from the University of Illinois in 1912, she applied to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and was appointed as a medical missionary to Harput in 1914. She is widely regarded as the first American woman physician to practice in the Near East.

Stationed in Harput during the Armenian Genocide, Parmelee witnessed the arrests and massacres of the town’s Armenian community. When the United States entered World War I and American diplomats evacuated Turkey in 1917, she chose to remain. She continued to serve at the American Hospital and traveled on horseback to provide care in surrounding villages.

After the war, Parmelee returned briefly to the United States for further study before joining Near East Relief in 1919 as a volunteer with the American Women’s Hospitals. She returned to Harput as Assistant Director of the NER Hospital, where she cared for thousands of refugees, including 3,000 orphans, and taught maternal and child health. Fluent in Armenian, Turkish, French, and Greek, she played an essential role in serving diverse communities.

Reassigned to the American Women’s Hospitals in 1922, Parmelee established a tent hospital on the Macedonian coast to aid refugees fleeing the Smyrna catastrophe. In 1923 she founded the AWH School of Nursing in Salonika and later opened a second school in Kokkinia. She served as Director of American Women’s Hospitals services in Greece from 1928 to 1941 and as a medical adviser to NEF’s work in Albania.

Parmelee returned to the United States during the Axis occupation of Greece and earned a Master of Public Health from Harvard. In 1943 she became NEF’s Overseas Director of Maternal and Child Health, serving in Cairo and later at the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in Gaza. Afterward she worked on the IMERRA medical relief ship serving the Aegean islands, directed the NEF School of Physical Therapy in Athens, and taught at Pierce College in Elleniko. She retired in 1953 and died in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1973 at the age of 88.