Ruth A. Parmalee

Mavi Boncuk

(pictured left) Dr Ruth Parmalee American missionary doctor in Turkey and founder of American Women's Hospital at Salonica. (c.1925)

Parmalee, Ruth A. "Reminiscences of Twenty Years in the Near East." Women in Medicine, 51 (January 1936) 20-23.[A missionary child born in Turkey, Parmalee went to the U.S. for her MD, then returned to Turkey as a medical missionary. Also worked in Greece.]

Allen Dulles, the State Department's Near East Division chief (and later CIA Director), found it hard to keep things under wraps as Bristol requested. "Confidentially the State Department is in a bind," Dulles cautioned in April 1922. Our task would be simple if the reports of the atrocities could be declared untrue or even exaggerated but the evidence, alas, is irrefutable and the Secretary of State wants to avoid giving the impression that while the United States is willing to intervene actively to protect its commercial interests, it is not willing to move on behalf of the Christian minorities. And the evidence mounted. In May 1922, four American relief workers, Major Forrest D. Yowell of Washington DC, Dr. Mark Ward of New York, Dr. Ruth Parmalee of Boston, and Isabel Harely of Rhode Island, were all expelled from their posts in Turkey.

See also: Morton, Rosalie Slaughter: Papers, 1898-1955. Physician; founder and director, American Women's Hospital, 1917-18; surgeon with Serbian Army on Salonica front, 1916; founder and chairman, International Serbian Educational Committee, 1919-28; author of A Woman Surgeon (1937).