Emma Cushman (1863-1931), Saving World War I Orphans

Cushman’s primary concern was helping women and children obtain the basics of food, shelter and safety. Gadarine Topjian Boudakian, one of Cushman’s young charges, later described Cushman as a guardian angel, praising her not only for her courage, but also for her ability to help the girls — some of whom were rescued from harems or other mistreatment — heal from psychological trauma.

By war’s end, Cushman had charge of at least 1,000 orphans. At one point, the only other adult was the cook!

“Very Much a Fighter”

The end of the war did not end the misery in Turkey. After the Armistice, the rise of the Nationalist Movement meant that Christians were very much in danger, but, as the Near East Relief Foundation’s Lucius E. Thayer later recalled, “Miss Cushman … was very much of a fighter when occasion demanded.”

He wasn’t speaking figuratively either, noting that Cushman was armed both day and night with pistols, with which, Thayer said, “she was just as good a shot as the best of us.”

Saving the Orphans

By this time, Cushman was working for Near East Relief, which put her in charge of three orphanages and 2,000 children. “It was … a heavy problem to know what to do with the orphans and other helpless people who depended on me for life,” she wrote.

In 1922, an enormous, deliberately set fire, popularly known as the Great Smyrna Disaster, destroyed the Greek and Armenian sections of the City of Smyrna, Turkey (today called Izmir). Cushman helped to evacuate 22,000 orphans, personally leading 1,700 children to safety in Corinth, Greece.

There, another orphanage, now with 3,000 children, took on all the characteristics of a Cushman enterprise: coeducational classrooms and sports; a form of self-governance by the children, including elected leaders and a juvenile court; and vocational instruction. Her orphans became “the best farmers, the most skillful artisans and the tidiest housewifes [sic] to be found.”

Years of living in almost impossible conditions and always on the edge took their toll. On a Christmas vacation visit to Cairo in late 1930, Cushman suddenly fell ill. A combination of anemia and malignant malaria proved to be too much and she died in 1931. Her funeral drew more than 500 of “her” orphans who had relocated to Egypt, along with representatives of many humanitarian groups and the governments of the U.S. and Greece.

Award-Winning but Obscure

During her lifetime, Cushman was awarded the Cross of the French Legion of Honor, the Gold Cross of Jerusalem, the Gold Cross of the Order of the Redeemer (from Greece), the Queen Alexandra War Medal (from the U.K.), the Distinguished Service Medal of the Near East Relief Foundation and the Blessing of the Greek Orthodox Church from the Patriarch of Constantinople (now Istanbul). Yet, all these honors proved ephemeral, and Cushman is little-remembered today.

Why is Cushman such an obscure figure in nursing? First, her trips home were rare. She was, as she once remarked, “too busy to go home to America to lecture and to be interviewed and to be written and talked about.”

In honor of their effort, the three young documentary filmmakers — Colin Caviness, Luke Boyden and Colin Everts — received permission to inscribe Cushman’s headstone in the American Cemetery in Cairo, where, until recently, she had been buried in an unmarked grave.

You can watch the kids’ remarkable documentary, “Emma Cushman: A Light in the Darkness,” on YouTube.

ELIZABETH HANINK, RN, BSN, PHN,  is a Working Nurse staff writer with extensive hospital and community-based nursing experience.

In this Article: Historical Nurses, WW1