William E. Rambo was a physician from Philadelphia who served Near East Relief at Batoum (Batumi), the Black Sea port that was the organization’s principal gateway into the Caucasus. Through Batoum passed the relief workers, supplies, and refugees moving between the coast and the interior of Armenia, where hundreds of thousands of survivors of the Armenian Genocide had fled the massacres and deportations in Ottoman Turkey.
Rambo reached the Caucasus during the years of the great typhus epidemics, when refugees were dying in the streets of Alexandropol (Gyumri) and Erivan (Yerevan) by the score each day and several American doctors and nurses lost their lives to the disease they were fighting. As a doctor in that setting, he treated refugees and orphans against typhus, dysentery, and the other diseases of famine and overcrowding. He survived his service and returned to the United States. This undated photo of Dr. Rambo in Alexandropol is captioned, “back from Batoum.”
If you are related to Dr. Rambo, or have photographs, letters, or family stories about his service, we would be glad to hear from you at [email protected].
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