Emma D. Cushman

Emma Darling Cushman was offered safe conduct out of Turkey and turned it down. She had run the American Christian Hospital at Konia (Konya) as its superintendent since about 1907, training the nurses and overseeing the wards and the operating room. When the United States broke off relations, she was left without an American colleague, and the offer to leave for Constantinople (Istanbul) covered her alone. She answered that she would go if the same assurance were given to every one of the women and girls in her care. It was refused. She stayed.

She remained at Konia through the war and did not see adequate supplies again for five years. Konia became a detention center for Allied prisoners, and Cushman handled their remittances, petitioned the authorities on their behalf, and formally represented the consular interests of several governments. Afterward she moved to Greece. In 1923 the Greek government put two thousand refugee children into the army barracks above Corinth, and Cushman organized them into an orphanage. Barton, writing in 1930, called her a heroine in Konia and a mother to two thousand children in Corinth. She died at Cairo of blackwater fever at the turn of 1931 and was buried there.