Esther Pohl Lovejoy: The Experience of American Woman Physician during Smyrna Disaster

Abstract

During the Armenian Genocide, physicians played a major role to rescue Armenians who were on the verge of annihilation. Some of them arrived in the Ottoman Empire to save the civilian population from humanitarian disaster. Among them was Esther Paul Lovejoy, a successful physician from the USA, a suffragist. After WWI, Lovejoy, as the head of the American Women’s Hospital Service and her like-minded colleagues organized extensive medical relief in France, in the Balkans, in the Ottoman Empire, and in Armenia. Adhering to her Hippocratic Oath, Lovejoy rushed to Smyrna to rescue the besieged Christians in September, 1922. During her 10 days in Smyrna, Lovejoy, being the only American woman and one of the three doctors working in the city, provided medical care in extreme conditions and participated in the evacuation of about 250,000 Armenians and Greeks. She wrote and published her eyewitness accounts of the Smyrna disaster in her book, “Certain Samaritans” in 1927.