- Person
- Lillian Wald
- Lived
- 1867–1940
- Field
- Public health nursing
- From
- American
The story
Lillian Wald was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1867 into a prosperous German-Jewish family and grew up in Rochester, New York. Turned down by Vassar College at sixteen because of her age, she later trained at the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses, graduating in 1891, and then began studying at the Woman's Medical College to become a doctor.
In 1893 she agreed to teach a class in home nursing for poor immigrant families on New York's Lower East Side. During one class a child led her to a sick mother lying in a dilapidated tenement. Wald later described that short walk as a baptism of fire that showed her how badly the city's social and economic arrangements were failing its poorest residents. She left medical school and, with her fellow nurse Mary Brewster, moved into the neighbourhood so she could care for people where they lived.
In 1895 she settled at 265 Henry Street and founded the Nurses' Settlement, later the Henry Street Settlement. Wald pioneered public health nursing and coined the name of the profession. Her nurses charged on a sliding scale so that no one was turned away, answered calls from doctors, charities and families, kept daily records and ran educational classes. The banker Jacob Schiff quietly helped fund the work, and by 1905 the nurses ran eighteen district centres and cared for 4,500 patients that year.
Her ideas spread quickly. In 1902 she started the first public school nursing programme in the United States, in New York City. In 1909 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company began a nursing service for its policyholders at her suggestion, and other insurers followed. Lectures she organised led Teachers College at Columbia University to create a department of nursing and health in 1910, and in 1912 the new National Organization for Public Health Nursing chose her as its first president. During the 1918 influenza pandemic she chaired the Nurses' Emergency Council, which sent nurses into stricken homes across the city.
She also campaigned for children's welfare, women's rights and racial integration, insisted that Henry Street classes be integrated, and hosted the conference that led to the founding of the NAACP in 1909. Her work lives on in the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, and she was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1970 and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993.
Why it matters
Wald's model of nurses working in neighbourhoods, homes and schools became public health nursing, a profession that now cares for communities across the world.
About Lillian Wald
Nurse who founded New York’s Henry Street Settlement, coined the term “public health nurse” launched school nursing in the U.S. and helped create the federal Children’s Bureau.
Sources
- Lillian D. Wald (1867-1940) Social Welfare History Project, VCU Libraries
- Lillian Wald Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.