Dr. Mabel Elliott

Mabel Evelyn Elliott (born 1881) took her medical degree at Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1904 and was practicing in Benton Harbor, Michigan, when the American Women's Hospitals selected and equipped her for relief service. She sailed on the Leviathan in February 1919 with a large party of relief workers and went out to Marash, where she took over the German missionary hospital and ran it as the American relief hospital. She was the American doctor in charge there when Turkish Nationalist forces took the city in February 1920 and the French garrison withdrew. Elliott left with them, in the middle of the night and in deep snow, alongside the Armenian population fleeing the city. "With trembling hearts we stumbled out into the darkness," she wrote. "This was at 10.30 P.M., February 10." Thousands of Armenians died on that road.

She came home, then went back. In the autumn of 1920 the American Women's Hospitals appointed her head of its service in the Near East, and through 1921 she directed the medical work at Ismid (Izmit), Derindje, and Bardazag, running the hospital and training Armenian nurses. In August 1921 she was sent to Erivan (Yerevan) to take over Near East Relief's medical work in the Caucasus, where she served as medical director. The patients were largely orphans. "In Armenia," she wrote, "we found the medical relief of 30,000 children on our hands. I mean this literally. There was not one healthy child among them." At Alexandropol (Gyumri) her staff opened fourteen hospitals and treated trachoma in eighteen thousand children, morning after morning. She moved on to Greece and the Aegean after the burning of Smyrna in 1922, and organized the quarantine station on Macronissi for refugees arriving from Anatolia. Her account of the work, Beginning Again at Ararat, appeared in 1924.