Scovil, Elisabeth Robinson

  • DCB profile notes:
    • Teacher, nurse, and author; b. 30 April 1849 in Saint John, daughter of Samuel James Scovil, a lawyer, and Mary Eliza Robinson; great-grandniece of John Robinson; d. unmarried 20 Nov. 1934 in Bishop’s Stortford, England, and was buried there.
    • Elisabeth Robinson Scovil was descended on her father’s side from a long line of Church of England clergymen, including one of the first Anglican priests to settle in New Brunswick, a loyalist who arrived in 1788. Her mother came from a prominent military and political family, also loyalists. Education for Scovil was privately arranged and lasted until she was 16. Always an avid reader, she became well versed in Scripture and was also proficient on the pianoforte. When she was 19, her life of privilege was disrupted by the bankruptcy, attempted flight, and temporary jailing of her father. The disgraced family moved to her mother’s former home in Douglas, near Fredericton, and Elisabeth taught for a time in York County. The stigma of her father’s troubles was such that he was never again able to find employment. Rescue came in 1879 in the form of a bequest of a Scovil family farm at Lower Jemseg, near Gagetown, a property Elisabeth would name Meadowlands; the family moved there the following year.
    • Having considered life’s options and realized that, for her, marriage was not a desirable one, at the age of 29 Scovil enrolled at the Boston Training School for Nurses. Upon qualifying in her profession, Scovil took a position as head of the infirmary at St Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., where she remained for eight years. She then served as superintendent of nursing at the Newport Hospital in Rhode Island until 1894.
    • As her journalistic activities increased, Scovil had begun publishing, in 1888, her 24 known books dealing with nursing, parenting, children’s interests, and spiritual guidance. The second of these, A baby’s requirements (1892), went through at least eight editions and was praised by the American Journal of Nursing for its practicality and its “unusually clear and simple style.” Her last book, Common ailments of children (Philadelphia), would appear in 1930, when she was 81. Her publications made her known across North America and in Great Britain. In Canada, her work on the proper diet for infants was acknowledged by Adelaide Hoodless, the well-known promoter of home economics. In 1904 Scovil was listed in London’s Gentlewoman as one of “the English-speaking women who have achieved distinction in work for the public good, or in the arts and professions.”
    • Not only a prolific writer, Scovil was also a social activist.
    • Because she had made shrewd investments and had been paid for her work with the Ladies’ Home Journal partly in Curtis Publishing Company stocks, which soared in value, Scovil became, as she informed a grandniece, a millionaire. She was extremely generous to family members and to such causes as the roof fund for her local church and the Pickett Memorial Fund, started in 1910 by her friend and fellow nurse Lucy Vail Pickett to help sick clergymen and their families. Scovil would later become the secretary and organizer of this second fund, which was eventually named the Pickett Scovil Memorial Fund and still exists more than a century later. Active in other church work, in 1906 she had been made a life member of the local Woman’s Auxiliary to the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, and in 1919 she was chair of the diocesan women’s committee of the Anglican “Forward Movement.
  • Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=7364
  • Find a Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/262984027/elisabeth-robinson-scovil