UNBREAKABLE HEALER

Pedersen offers a biography of an American physician who fought to save refugees struggling with trauma after World War I.

Turkish nationalist forces were responsible for the deaths of about 1.5 million Armenians and 300,000 to 1.2 million Greeks during a period that coincided with the advent of World War I. It caused suffering on an unimaginable scale, and Pedersen’s remarkable biography chronicles the story of Mabel E. Elliott, who worked tirelessly to alleviate the horrors she witnessed daily after arriving at a hospital in the interior city of Marash in 1919. Drawing on letters and other extracts from Elliott’s papers, the author allows the reader to experience the health crises she witnessed—including rampant tuberculosis, typhus, and malaria, which ensured that no bed stayed unoccupied for more than 12 hours—as well as terrible injuries, as when a young girl’s vision was destroyed by a surgery that left her cross-eyed. For Elliott, it marked the first of many reminders of “the things that human beings can do, carelessly, without rancor, laughing, to other human beings,” as she stated in her 1924 memoir, Beginning Again at Ararat. However, the physician—who has already made history as one of Chicago-based Rush Medical College’s trio of female graduates in 1904—never flinched or shirked service, as the author observes: “To Mabel, nothing was impossible. It was simply an estimate of what she needed to get it done.” Over the course of this biography, Pedersen offers an excellent account of Elliott’s experiences that are the clear result of impressive detective work on her part. It effectively shines a bright light on a forgotten figure who “wanted more, to aspire to a role few women did at that time,” and went on to perform heroic work. It’s an inspiring reminder of how a single person’s effort can have enormous effects, and one that will certainly resonate in today’s world of refugee crises.

An often-riveting account of a resourceful doctor’s good works.