Dockyard in 1856, the year Eliza Lusher was nursing people with yellow fever.

Illustration: Hallowell painting, courtesy of the Bermuda Maritime Museum.

Eliza Lusher, one of the earliest known black Bermudian nurses, went about her work with a spirit of selflessness. A widowed mother of two from Southampton, she risked her life caring for victims of yellow fever during the 19th century, but was never paid for her services.

Parliament denied her request for financial compensation, and her exposure to yellow fever, a highly contagious disease, may have caused her own death at age 40.

A woman with both a sense of adventure and a willingness to serve, she petitioned the British government to send her to Scutari, Turkey, to nurse soldiers wounded during the Crimean War (1853-1856). 

Had her petition been successful, she would have been serving in the same arena as British nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale.

Remarkable

There are many gaps in Lusher’s life, but the basic facts that have been unearthed from public records paint a picture of a woman who was remarkable by any measure.

Lusher was born around 1819 to enslaved parents Anthony Darrell and Lettice Jones. In 1825, Anthony Darrell obtained his freedom. In 1827—seven years before the abolition of slavery—he married Lettice, who was still a slave.

In March 1837, Eliza married John Henry Lusher in the parish church of Southampton. They had two daughters Eleanor, born in 1838, and Carunay Mary Lusher, born in 1844. In 1852, Henry Lusher died, leaving Eliza to raise two daughters on her own.

Dockyard

In 1853, Bermuda was hit by an outbreak of yellow fever. Lusher   nursed soldiers stationed at Dockyard and their wives.

In  1855, she petitioned the British government to serve in Scutari. News of the Crimean War had filtered to Bermuda. The Governor had established a Patriotic Fund for soldiers’ widows and orphans, to which Bermudians, black and white, contributed.

On January 2, 1855, just three days before Governor Freeman Murray forwarded her petition to England, The Royal Gazette ran an appeal from Murray for contributions to the Patriotic Fund. The same edition carried a story about Florence Nightingale and a team of nurses caring for the wounded at Scutari.

Governor Murray backed Lusher in her desire to serve, stating in his January 5 forwarding letter: “This woman was very useful in attending the sick soldiers during the prevalence of Yellow Fever in this Colony in 1853 and bears an excellent character.

“She is most anxious that Government should furnish her with a passage to Turkey for this purpose and from what I can learn of her I believe her services would be extremely serviceable in such a capacity.”

The British government replied the following month, declining her request, without explanation.

Compensation

Three years later, in July 1858, the Governor received a second petition from Lusher. This time she was seeking financial compensation.

In her petition, she said that she had supported herself as a nurse. Although she had nursed yellow fever patients in Dockyard in 1853, she had never been paid because the colonel who had promised to pay her had died.

In 1856, there was another yellow fever outbreak.  She nursed 85 people who had come down with the disease over several months, treating them with her own medicines and supplies. All of them had recovered but they were extremely poor and unable to pay her for her services.

She went on to explain that because she had become seriously ill herself, she had been unable to apply for compensation earlier.

Denied

Her petition was presented to Parliament, but in August 1858, parliamentarians denied her appeal by a vote of 13 to 5.

Lusher died in 1859 and was buried in the parish church of Warwick. The cause of death was unknown, but her exposure to yellow fever and the reference in her petition to becoming “seriously and dangerously ill” invite speculation that she may have contracted the disease herself.

Her daughters were 21 and 15 at the time of her death. Public records reveal that her younger daughter Carunay later married twice, first to a Bassett, then to a Bean.

Author Dr. Kenneth Robinson said information about black women’s public service in the 19th Century is sketchy, but Lusher is one who merits recognition.  Writing in Heritage, he said: “ In particular a sick nurse named Eliza Jane Lusher rendered such outstanding service during both of the yellow fever epidemics of the 1850s that she would have been guaranteed very honourable mention in Bermuda’s annals.”