KAVALJIAN
Physician • Historic First
Zaruhi Kavaljian
The empire had no medical school that would take a woman — so she earned her M.D. in America and came home to Adapazar as the Ottoman Empire's first female physician.
The empire had no medical school that would take a woman — so she earned her M.D. in America and came home to Adapazar as the Ottoman Empire's first female physician.
Zaruhi Kavaljian (1877–1969) was the first female physician of the Ottoman Empire — an Armenian woman from Adapazar who earned a medical degree in an age when the empire's own schools would not teach medicine to women at all.
Educated at the American college in her hometown, she crossed the ocean to study medicine in the United States, earning her M.D. at the turn of the century, and returned to practice among her own people — treating patients in Adapazar and serving communities through war, deportation, and upheaval that would scatter Ottoman Armenians to the winds.
Her 1903 portrait in physician's dress survives as one of the quietly revolutionary images of Armenian history: a woman, a doctor, decades before the states around her admitted women to the profession.
Before the empire had a single medical school that would take her, she simply became a doctor anyway.
— On Zaruhi KavaljianKavaljian's first has been reclaimed by historians of medicine and of Armenian women alike. Every ranking of Ottoman and Turkish medical pioneers now begins with an Armenian woman from Adapazar who refused to wait for permission.
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