Elizabeth Tyler Barringer
A public health nurse pioneer who created the Stillman House Settlement for patients of color
Elizabeth Tyler Barringer, born in 1861, studied at both Freedmen’s Hospital Training School for Nurses and Lincoln School for Nurses, becoming part of the first generation of Black nurses to earn a professional nursing education and work as a registered nurse. In 1906 she was hired as the first Black visiting nurse by nurse Lillian Wald, the founder of Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service in New York City, who placed her in a capacity to address the high tuberculosis morbidity and mortality rates in Black communities.
During this time however, when healthcare was still segregated, she overcame discrimination from both whites and people of color who did not trust her expertise. To find her own patients to treat, she ventured into underserved Black neighborhoods that lacked access to healthcare, including the San Juan Hill district on Manhattan’s west side. There she established the Stillman House Settlement and worked with fellow Black public health nurses to offer more than healthcare by expanding its services to include community education, civic courses, a library, a children’s playground, bank services, and carpentry and sewing classes, ultimately becoming a center of uplift in the community that was otherwise under-resourced. Barringer went on to emulate this public health nursing model and worked to prevent, mitigate, and manage tuberculosis outbreaks in Pennsylviania, Delaware, and New Jersey.
Sources
We sourced information for the above biography from the Amsterdam News, Black Nurses of Stillman House, and the book The Paths We Tread: Blacks in Nursing Worldwide 1854–1994 by M. Elizabeth Carnegie.
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