Rosalie Harvey

Rosalie Harvey died in India where for half a century and more she afforded a refuge for countless poor animals and suffering people. She was born just after the middle of the 19th century at Seaford, daughter of the vicar here.

From her earliest girlhood she dreamed of caring for unhappy beings, and something in the stories of the Far East caught her imagination. When she was 28 she managed to go out for the Zenana Medical Mission to Poona, and a little later moved on to Nasik where she worked all the rest of her life. Not once could she be persuaded to leave her work for a little visit to her family.

The fifty years of Miss Harvey's labour made a mark in the district. She devoted herself to sick and wounded animals, and then turned her attention to unwanted children; and before she was old she knew that 1500 homeless little ones had been cared for in the home she started at Nasik, now the Babies' Home.

 

The children grew up, passed into useful employments, a few staying with their foster mother. One nursed her through her last illness.

But when this brave woman looked back on her life she knew that her work among the lepers was her great achievement. During years of plague and famine she had worked in a relief camp and met such terrible cases of leprosy that she felt as if nothing mattered but caring for such sufferers. She begged a little money, built an iron shelter, put 35 lepers into it, and remained in charge to the end.

They called her Aayi, the mother. There were those to whom she was the very light of heaven. A few years ago she was given the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal, but her babies' homes and her leper asylums were her medal.

 

All the honours she wanted, and all the comfort when she died, was the memory of the thousands she had rescued from want, misery and disease.

She would ask no other immortality than that her work should go on.

 

 

 

 

 

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