Content area
Full Text
In 1893, Dr. Mary Eddy, an American Protestant missionary with the Presbyterian-run Syria Mission (based in what is present-day Lebanon), became the first woman to obtain a license to practice medicine in the Ottoman Empire. The daughter of missionaries and brought up in Syria, Dr. Eddy spent much of her adult life roaming the countryside of Greater Syria, alternately curing poor villagers' ills and praying for their souls. This article examines the life of Dr. Mary Eddy, exploring questions about the tensions and intersections between history, biography, and transnationalism that confront the historian when writing about the life of a transnational individual.
In 1917, Dr. Mary Eddy, an American Protestant missionary with the Presbyterian-run Syria Mission (based in what is present-day Lebanon), and the first and only woman to obtain a license to practice medicine in the Ottoman Empire, was a broken woman. Only fifty-three-years-old, she had suffered a stroke and lost her sight, which was ironic, considering she had specialized in eye diseases. Her career as a missionary doctor in Syria was over.1 Sent back to the United States at the outbreak of World War I for medical treatment, she never recovered. From then until her death in 1923, her health steadily deteriorated. Friends, relatives, and mission officials corresponded among themselves over how to pay for her medical and nursing care, as she went from being the pride of the mission to a problem for them. Now, wrote an old friend who had visited her in a "home for incurables" in Washington DC, she was "very quiet, very clear in her mind, but pathetically weak. Her reply to me when I asked her if she were lonely was that she was only lonely for Syria."2
This image of pathos contrasts sharply with Mary Eddy's earlier self as an "itinerating," active, vigorous woman who roamed the Syrian countryside on horseback, encamping in villages where she established clinics, performed surgeries in tents, and held evangelical meetings, alternately curing and praying. Her life then was "so full of satisfaction and joy" that she just could not help sharing it, as she wrote in a letter to the home mission board.3
Who Was Mary Eddy and Why Should We Care?
Who was Mary Eddy? And why should...