An American physician in Turkey : a narrative of adventures in peace and war

Front matter

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Preface

Ir has seemed to me most desirable that the story of the siege of Van and of the flight from Asia into Europe of most of the present survivors of a martyred race should be told in detail and put into permanent form. As the Armenians of Van were believed to have rebelled against the Ottoman Government, it is important that the facts of the case should be made widely known, and that their actual loyalty, their patience under almost unimaginable provocation, and their heroism when loyalty and patience proved of no avail, should receive their due meed of publicity and appreciation. I speak of what I do know by the witness of my own eyes and ears, my own nerves quivering in sympathy with the torture of the people I have labored for, my own fellowship with their sufferings.

Many other missionaries in other parts of Turkey have also shared in the tragedy that has befallen the Armenian race, some by the giving up of their own lives, others by the sacrifice of what was dearer than life itself.

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| PREFACE

When I began this book I meant to write only of the siege and flight and the events that led up to them, preceding these chapters by a chapter or two of travel experiences and memorable conversations with Turk and Christian, but I was persuaded, instead, to tell the whole story of my life in Turkey. Should there seem to be too much ego in these reminiscences, its presence may be explained by the fact that while writing I have seemed to myself to be conversing with those whom I have met face to face, and talked to from lecture platform and in hospitable homes all over the United States for the last two years: listeners who have shown and expressed such kind interest in my personal experiences that I have been tempted to enter into considerable detail in the present volume, which is intended - especially for their perusal.

I have recorded some of my most intimately personal experiences because they have so profoundly influenced my outlook on life and my contact with it. The interview with the Moslem Vali, in “Before Governors and Kings,” meant so much to me in crystallizing my own religious ideas that I have felt impelled to relate it in this book, and at the request of many friends, will

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PREFACE include it with the story of Kharaba in a separate booklet at a later date.

My dearest hope is to be able to build a memorial hospital in Van to take the place of the one that has been destroyed. I know so well how exceedingly great is the need for a hospital there. The proceeds of this book will be devoted to that purpose. Should any reader desire to help in realizing this hope, will he communicate with me or with Mr. F. H. Wiggin, Treasurer of the American Board, 14 nopeon Street, Boston? ;

I would here express my gratitude to my collaborator, Miss Grace H. Knapp, without whose aid this book could not have been written.

I would also acknowledge my indebtedness to the Reverend William E. Strong for permission to use one of the maps from his book, The History of the American Board, and to Miss Mabel Whittlesey, of New Haven, to my brother, the Reverend Sydney Ussher, and to the Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief for the loan of photographs for illustrations.

CrareNcE D. Ussuer, M.D.

AUBURNDALE, Mass.

October 17, 1917.

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Contents

. LAUNCHED

. A YEAR IN Harput

. SCENE-SHIFTING

Chapter I Launched

“WOULD you be afraid to go to Harput, Turkey? Would you be willing? Could you get ready by the first of September?”’

These questions were fired at me in quick succession one morning in August by Dr. James L. Barton, to whom [ had been introduced but a few moments earlier and whose eyes had been searching through me as I sat chatting with his associate. They were wholly unexpected questions, for the interview was an unpremeditated and informal one. I had been visiting my boyhood’s home in Canada, and on my way through Boston had stopped to see the headquarters of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, an organization for which I had a profound admiration the first American organization to send missionaries abroad.

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Now the A.B.C.F.M. is a Congregational Board and I am an Episcopalian. Yet I accepted Dr. Barton’s challenge. While yet a boy in the high school in Montreal I had signed the Student Volunteer declaration, “I am willing and desirous, if God permits, to become a foreign missionary,” after hearing an address by Robert Wilder, then making his first tour in behalf of the newly organized movement. Later I had completed the course in a theological seminary in Philadelphia, worked my way through a medical college in Kansas City, Missouri, and offered myself to the Foreign Mission Board of the Reformed Episcopal Church for work in India. . There being no opening for a medical missionary at that time, I had settled in Kansas City and built up a large practice there. My receipts ina month from this practice were greater than would be a year’s salary from the American Board. But the rewards of work on the mission field—vwell, I will leave it to the succeeding pages.of this book to show what these were. I| myself had but a dim prevision of them twenty years ago.

I could not get ready by the first of September,

1 See Appendix C.

however, not succeeding in closing out my practice till the following spring; then I sailed from Boston on the 8.8. Armenian, May 12, 1808, arriving in Constantinople some time in June. In Turkey any ignorant native quack might practice unmolested. Diplomaed physicians from other countries, however, had to pass an examination by the Imperial Medical College in Constantinople before the lives of the subjects of this paternal government could be entrusted to their care. [I had made a formal application for this examination, which had heretofore been conducted through an interpreter from the American Legation, but after several postponements was informed one day that no interpreter would be permitted ; that a new law had gone into effect that very day requiring examinations to be conducted in Turkish or French only. In vain I urged that it was unfair to subject me to the terms of a law passed subsequently to the date set for my examination. ‘The president of the faculty told me that the only way in which I could secure the privilege of an examination through an interpreter would be to “ask our American Ambassador to ask the Minister of Foreign Affairs to request the Minister of the Interior to ask the

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Minister of Education to ask the Grand Vizier to ask His Imperial Majesty the Sultan to permit the faculty to examine through an interpreter.” In view of the dilatory methods of conducting all official business in Turkey this looked like postponing the test till I should learn the language.

I had acquired some knowledge of French during my school life in Montreal and during two summers spent in a French-Canadian village. Although I had not spoken the language for thirteen years and had not the technical vocabulary, I informed my examiners that I would try the French. They were probably eager for the twenty-five-pound fee which would be divided amongst them, gave mea very fair test, and passed me, the questions being asked and answered by means of an amusing mixture of French, Latin, and pantomime.

My first custom-house experience was an example of “the spoiling of [their] goods” which Americans in Turkey had to “take joyfully.” The American Board had given me for my professional equipment one hundred dollars which I had had to supplement with all of my personal funds. The custom-house officials appropriated one hundred and forty dollars worth of the contents of my boxes. ‘They confiscated my new Standard Dictionary because it contained the “pernicious” words “liberty” and “revolution” ; cut the maps out of my Bible because on several of them ‘ Armenia” was to be found; appraised my microscope at twenty times its real cost and made me pay duty on this valuation. ‘The box containing my mattress was sent on to Harput empty; the sanitary inspector at Constantinople informed me that the only way in which I could regain possession of its contents was to obtain an affidavit from the Turkish Consul in Boston to the effect that there had been no horse disease in America when that mattress was made! As the inspector used the article in question throughout the period covered by our correspondence concerning it, it became too populous for my purpose. ,

When I left Constantinople I bade good-bye to a group of missionaries whom to know was, for a young man just entering upon his missionary career, a wonderful inspiration and incentive to self-sacrificing and devoted service. Among them was the veteran scholar and linguist, the Reverend Elias Riggs, to whom I had brought a message from Dr. Cyrus Hamlin.

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We glided through a dreamland of beauty in steaming slowly up the Bosphorus; low hills wooded to the very edge of the sparkling waves, glittering bubbles of mosque domes, fairy minarets, pastel-tinted houses gleaming palely amid their embowering trees, with red-tiled roofs to lend a dash of warm color to the scene and black pointed cypresses to give it character and a somber dignity, anchoring it to reality; then, orchards, vineyards, scattered villas, and gray crenellated walls and towers centuries old; and the mountain-bordered shores of the Black Sea were a constant delight to the eye with their rich verdure and their picturesque towns and villages climbing steep slopes, clinging to jutting headlands, or encircling deep bays.

We would anchor about a mile from shore at each port and instantly a swarm of small boats would row frantically toward us, looking like excited water-bugs, and our steamer would be boarded by a vociferous crowd eager for passengers and freight. |

I left the ship at Samsun and traveled in a spring wagon to Marsovan, where there was a large and important mission plant including a college— Anatolia College—and where I preached through an interpreter my first sermon in Turkey, and helped celebrate the Fourth of July by a patriotic picnic. 3 Thence to Amasia, where I was interested in an old castle built by Mithridates and in Roman tombs with great arched doorways carved in the solid rock; then to Tocat, where I photographed the tomb of Henry Martyn. Near Sivas there were hot springs which invited one irresistibly to plunge in. I did so, but in a moment a crowd of natives gathered who showed altogether too much interest in the big blond foreigner who could n’t tell them to clear out and who was beginning to find the heat of the water unendurable. Emphatic gestures made no impression on them, and they were just settling down to thoroughly enjoy the spectacle when the driver coming in put an end to the embarrassing situation. In Sivas also there was a large mission plant with schools of all grades and an orphanage established soon after the massacres of 1895. ‘There was, however, no physician in the station, and I was kept busy examining and prescribing for ailing children while waiting for the araba which was to be sent me from Harput. ‘This araba was a springless “‘ prairie schooner’’; the road,

(7 aa miles of which was in the bed of a stream, we traveled was so rough that the jolting frequently caused nosebleed, and was often so steep that we had to puta chain brake on the wheels to keep the great wagon from hurling the horses down the mountain.

The wooded hills of the coast gave way to bleak, bare mountain ranges and treeless, dusty plains where thorns and thistles abounded. There are no scattered farms or country houses in eastern Turkey. The peasants group themselves in villages wherever a natural water-supply is available, as their crops are dependent on artificial irrigation. ‘These villages with their orchards and fields were oases in the desert; ‘Malatia, which we reached after twelve days of travel from the coast, was one of the most beautiful, and here I was hospitably entertained in the home of its Protestant pastor.

When we came to the Euphrates a caravan of camels was being poled across the river, a few at a time, in a great scow, and we had to wait several hours for our turn. At the khan on the farther bank, which was to be our last stopping-place, we were greeted by a group of missionaries from Harput, and the next morning, some miles far-

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ther on our way, we were met by more of the Americans and many Armenians who had ridden out to welcome the new missionary. Soon we emerged from mountain passes into the great Harput plain studded with its green villages, and miles away, climbing a spur of the Anti-Taurus Range, could be seen the city itself and its famous old castle on the edge of a precipice from which Tamerlane had hurled hundreds of prisoners to their death.

The buildings of the American Mission were a thousand feet above the plain. Eighteen miles away the Taurus Range began to roll its purple waves toward the horizon. I could not tire of the view from our terrace during my stay in Harput, for it was never twice the same. Sometimes the distant ranges were hidden behind a wall of fog; sometimes we ourselves were shrouded in dense cold mist while the plains below lay warm in sunshine; and again, the mountain peaks rose like islands above a sea of clouds, and against their rocky cliffs dashed high in spray wind-driven billows of sunlit foam.

Chapter II A Year In Harput

I BEGAN work the afternoon after my arrival in Harput, finding fifty-three patients anxiously awaiting me.

The missionary physician is the best pioneer of Christianity in the Oriental countries which have such terrible need of his services. He enters the most hostile homes and prepares the hearts and minds of those whose bodies he cures for the further Christianizing influences of the mission church and school. But in the nineties the churches at home and their mission boards had not yet begun to realize the importance of the physician’s work; so this large station of the A.B.C.F.M., with its schools and churches in the city, its branch schools and churches in sixty villages and towns, its college and theological seminary, and its orphanages where a thousand children left fatherless by the massacres of 1895 were fed and clothed,’ was without a hospital.

1 A few years later this number was increased to fourteen hundred, and the children were taught useful trades.

Nor was one built here until 1909, and then by the voluntary gifts of friends who wished to raise a memorial to Annie Tracy Riggs, who died after less than two years on the field.

The houses of the missionaries had been destroyed by Turkish soldiers during the massacres, and President Gates, of Euphrates College, was superintending the construction of three new houses in a solid block to economize space and material. The eastern end was given tome. In this I opened an office, also a dispensary which I stocked with the medicines brought with me from America, and found an Armenian of some experience in this line to act as my apothecary and interpreter. Here I saw patients at all hours, many of them before breakfast; for Orientals, the original daylight-saving peoples, begin the day early.

Operations had to be performed in the patients’ own homes. During my first operation for cataract the woman lay on the mud floor of a small room under a window fourteen inches square from which I had to tear the paper glazing to obtain sufficient light. When I performed my first operation for stone I took a door from its hinges and laid it across two stools, placed the fase man on it, and knelt beside him. Both operations were entirely successful in spite of the unfavorable surroundings.

A large proportion of my patients suffered from ophthalmia, trachoma, and other eye diseases due to unsanitary conditions. Smallpox was prevalent and very often resulted in blindness, for people feared to open the eyes of the sufferer throughout his sickness, or to allow water to touch his eyes or skin. ‘They would treat ophthalmia with sulphate of zinc mixed with powdered sugar; it would cure the disease, but burned the cornea, causing opacities. ‘This is but a sample of the remedies in use by native quacks, many of which, when not absolutely dangerous, were most revolting; as, for instance, this panacea—‘“‘sword oil’’—made by hanging a “blind mouse” in a bottle of water in the sun till the mouse dissolved, then adding oil.

There were many severe burns to treat, due to peculiar methods of heating and cooking. The ‘most economical way to keep warm was to put a brazier of live coals under a wooden stool, cover it with a large four-inch-thick wool-stuffed quilt, then sit with feet and legs under this quilt. The brazier was often kicked over with disastrous consequences. People baked their thin sheets of bread above live coals on the sides of cylindrical ovens sunk in the ground, and their little ones not infrequently tumbled into these ovens. Tiny children often fell from the flat roofs of the houses, where they were allowed to play.

Infant mortality in Turkey was something frightful, about sixty per cent of all the babies dying before completing their second year. This was due mainly to the pitiable ignorance of their mothers. Girls were married very young and became virtually slaves in the homes of their husbands’ parents. The first bride in a household might not speak above a whisper until the next son to be married brought his wife home to become in her turn the “slavey” of the family. In Malatia I had seen a “bride” who after forty years of married life was still not permitted to speak aloud in the presence of her father-inlaw.

Women wore red veils on their heads both indoors and out. On the street these veils were made to conceal the face. The costume of the men differed slightly from the costume of the same class of men on the seacoast. There I had ira:

noted short jackets and trousers, tight below the knee, but with large seating capacity. Here the trousers were not tight below the knee. ‘his apparent waste of material was really an economy, for the usual cross-leg posture on divans or on low cushions works disaster with limited European garments. Those who had adopted “Frank” clothes loved to exchange them, when the business of the day was over, for long, loose calico wrappers in which they might be at ease in the privacy of their homes, and at mealtime sit comfortably on the floor around the low wooden tables on which the food was set in two. or three large bowls or platters from which each fed himself with a wooden spoon or a scoop made of thin bread.

A riding horse, rather than a doctor’s buggy, was essential to my work, and I want to tell the story of my first horse in Turkey. He was starving to death in his home on the Arabian plain, when Dr. Thom of Mardin* bought him for me, there being a famine at that time. When he was brought to me his ribs stood out in bold

1 Dr. Thom with two associates, Miss Fenenga and Dr. Andrus, was deported in 1915 from Mardin to Givas where be died of typhus seven weeks later. No charges had been brought against them.

Retr ak relief, his shoulder blades protruded, his head drooped till it almost touched the ground, and blood flowed from his mouth with every pull on the bit; this blood proved to be from a leech which had fastened itself under his tongue and sapped his vitality.

With care and feeding he soon put on flesh and regained his original strength. Sixteen hands high, with a long neck, he was unusually tall for an Arab horse, and was a powerful creature. Once in the early days of our acquaintance, when I was leading him in a direction opposite to that in which he wished to go, I suddenly felt myself seized by the muscles of the back, raised from the ground, and shaken as a terrier shakes a rat. I carried the marks of his teeth for months.

Nevertheless, Nedjib was not at all a vicious horse. He was gentle as well as spirited and fleet-footed, seemed to understand everything that was said to him, and was more responsive to a word than to the rein. We became very much attached to each other.

The little manifestation of temper I have described occurred during a vacation trip Mr. Ellsworth Huntington and I had undertaken for the

tse purpose of exploring an unmapped, beautiful lake in the Anti-Taurus Range, which had risen a foot a year for some six hundred years after a natural tunnel under the mountains, its former outlet, had become closed. It has now an artificial outlet into the Tigris River. We took soundings, and photographed it from neighboring mountain peaks. Having ridden to the top of one of these, we made a short cut down on foot, and soon the slope became so steep that in one place Nedjib stiffened his forelegs and slid down like a boy coasting on ice, throwing up a spray of gravel and small stones as he went.

Another incident of the same trip I relate because it illustrates the petty tyranny of Turkish officials, the sort of “ bluff” often necessary in dealing with them, and the “pull” my profession has given me in various situations.

We had happened to enter the province of Diarbekir without our passports. Mr. Huntington had heard of an ancient monastery near the town of Arghony on a mountain overlooking the Mesopotamian plain, and we wished to see the very ancient manuscripts we had been told it contained. Returning from our investigations in the monastery to the schoolhouse which

Bia we had made our headquarters, we were informed by a gendarme that the Mudir, or Governor of the town, begged that we should call on ‘him, and that he was awaiting us at the Government building. We went to the Government building to find the Mudir not yet arrived there. When he came he was attended by the entire Town Council. Coffee was brought in and served to all except Mr. Huntington and myself. The meaning of this omission was so obvious that I said to Mr. Huntington, ‘That was intended as an insult; let us go”’; and we returned to the schoolhouse with the Mudir and Council at our heels, calling, ‘“‘ Wait, my lord, wait, my lord.” We were supposed to be the Mudir’s prisoners, but this we did not know until a soldier stepped into the schoolroom with us. The school-teacher, Melcone, who had accompanied us to the monastery, was put under arrest, and was to be sent to the Lieutenant-Governor, or Mutessarif, at Maden. The Vali of the Province, a fanatical Mohammedan, had imprisoned a number of inoffensive school-teachers in the city of Diarbekir, and his sub-governors took their cue from him. Having got Melcone into this scrape, we made up our minds to get him out of it, so started to

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accompany him to Maden. Downstairs we found the Mudir and Town Council standing before our door. We were told our horses had been taken to the Government building, and we must walk up there.

“We will not. Our horses must be brought to us here.”

“Take his saddle-bags to the serai,”’ the Mudir commanded a small boy.

“Set them down,” I ordered. The boy obeyed me.

The Mudir then realized the futility of attempting to compel us and withdrew, sending for our horses.

Melcone was hurried off without being given a chance to bid good-bye to his wife, who came running after him with his coat. The mounted soldier who was forcing him along by punching. him in the back with his rifle barrel refused to permit the woman to come near her husband. This was too much for me. Riding in between the soldier and his prisoner, I said to the former, “‘Go on,” and to Melcone, ‘“‘ Go back and speak to your wife.” ‘The soldier had witnessed the duel of wills between myself and the Mudir and dared not disobey.

While we waited for the Mutessarif at Maden we were entertained by his secretaries and the judge of the court, who, hearing that I was the American doctor from Harput, sent for their friends to take advantage of my services. When the Mutessarif arrived, after due greeting he said : —

“ [have a sick friend whom I wish you to see.”

“With pleasure, but will you first kindly release Melcone, who unjustly, without any fault on his part, has been torn from his home and family?” |

“ Certainly, certainly! Now, will you see my friend?” But he made no move to release the prisoner.

“Your Excellency, will you be so good as to send this man home, and I will then see as many of your friends as you wish.”

Melcone was liberated, we gave him a present, and he went home happy, while the Mutessarif turned his audience hall into a medical clinic and showed us every courtesy.

Chapter III Scene-shifting

AFTER I had been in Harput a year, it was decided that I should go for six months to Van, as Dr. George C. Raynolds had begged the loan of a missionary for the winter and had suggested that I might take his medical work off his hands, leaving him free to devote himself wholly to general mission work. He and his wife, both over sixty years of age, were alone in that large city. They had the care of about six hundred orphans, the supervision of schools of all grades, and of two pastorless churches with large congregations.

Van was a twelve-days journey distant. I set out with Turkish muleteers with whom I could scarcely exchange a word, having, so far, the Armenian language only. Part of my furniture and outfit was with me on pack-horses, and the usual Turkish zabtieh or guard was furnished by the Government, the fact of whose escort makes the Government responsible for a traveler’s safety. When one zabtieh reaches the

NOOVM HOVOOVA GANUYNLUYAAO NV end of his “beat,” the chief official of the next willage provides another.

On the first day of our journey, as we were crossing a dilapidated bridge, Nedjib’s right hock went down into a hole and his left foot slipped off a sloping stone out over the river. The bridge was too narrow for me to dismount on either side, so I slipped off over his head. ‘Then, seeing he was about to fall over sideways with the certainty of fracturing his leg, I did the only thing possible under the circumstances— got under him and lifted him on my back. It took me some time to recover from the great strain, but the horse was saved, and we became closer friends than ever.

The village houses in the region we now entered are not of adobe as in the Harput plain, but of unhewn stones, one-storied, low-walled, windowless, with earthen roofs having a hole in the center to let in light and let out smoke from the ovens in the floor. There are no inns, but each village has its guest-room or odah. This is an earthen platform with wooden railing, at one end of a large stable. Having one’s horses in one’s own bedroom is the only way to insure their not being stolen or having their feed taken from them. One must have a bedstead and sleepingbag to keep from being devoured alive, and a small rug is a further protection from assault. The traveler must carry with him his own folding cot, bedding, toilet appliances, and candles or lantern, for nothing of the sort is to be found in the odah. He must also take his provisions with him and cook his meals himself; eggs and milk may sometimes be secured, but not much besides. The village considers it a religious duty to provide accommodations for strangers, but the keeper of the odah never refuses a baksheesh.

The more pretentious houses of the village are two-storied, with the stable on the first floor. We spent a night in one such during this journey. It was the house of a Kurdish chief, and its upper room was forty feet long with a fire place at one end in which half a dozen men could stand.

My muleteer and zabtieh had promised to feed and curry my horse. The curry-comb of the Orient is a saw-toothed, U-shaped piece of sheet metal with an iron rod as brace, on which loose iron rings make a great rattling when the comb is being used. Possibly this is to keep the owner of the horse informed as to his groom’s whereabouts!

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That night I had such a vivid dream that I sat up suddenly in my sleep and called out, “ Haidi, git!” (Get out.) My shout awakened me; it not only awakened my zabtieh and muleteers, but so startled them that they leaped from their beds and ran downstairs, and I soon heard the curry-comb in vigorous use. Their consciences were. evidently pricking them about a duty left undone. I had too little Turkish at my command to explain the joke when they returned sheepishly to the room.