Graduate School Update- the Sabbatical within the sabbatical-by Keith Lillian Wald ( I took much of this from The Social Welfare History Project) As I spent so many years working on the Lower East Side, I learned of the rich history of the area. So many of the pillars of progressive thought were born on its streets. Two days ago I posted something on Frances Perkins. Another human being who truly inspires me. Lillian D. Wald was a nurse, social worker, public health official, teacher, author, editor, publisher, woman’s rights activist, and the founder of American community nursing. Her unselfish devotion to humanity is recognized around the world and her visionary programs have been widely copied everywhere. Shortly after she began taking courses at the Women’s Medical College in New York, she accepted an invitation to organize classes in home nursing for immigrant families on the Lower East Side. Wald experienced a “baptism of fire” into reform work during one of her classes, when a child led her to a sick woman in a dilapidated tenement. She saw “all the maladjustments of oursocial and economic relations epitomized in this brief journey,” and she became intent on her own “responsibility” to bring affordable health care to those on the Lower East Side. She left medical school and, with her friend and colleague Mary Brewster, moved to the College Settlement House on Rivington Street and then to a tenement house on Jefferson Street. In 1895, Wald took up residence at 265 Henry Street where she founded the Nurses’ Settlement. Making health care her first priority, Wald pioneered public health nursing – and coined the name of the profession – with the idea that the nurse’s “organic relationship with the neighborhood should constitute the starting point for a universal service to the region.” The nurses operated on a sliding fee scale, so that all city residents might have access to medical attention. Nurses responded to calls from physicians, charitable agencies, and individuals in need. They kept daily records and offered educational classes. In 1905 alone, Henry Street nurses had eighteen district centers and cared for forty-five hundred patients. Although the Henry Street Settlement was the first and best known, branches were opened throughout Manhattan and the Bronx to provide health care, community programs, and employment to New Yorkers regardless of race or ethnicity. Wald made the Henry Street Settlement available as the meeting place for the National Negro Conference, which became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Wald was also a suffragist who worked to secure the right of women to vote and supported her employee and protégé, Margaret Sanger, in her battle to give women the right to birth control. She fought for peace, leading several marches in protest of World War I. But when war became inevitable, she pitched in to do her part as Chairman of the Committee on Community Nursing of the American Red Cross. She also helped chair the Red Cross campaign to wipe out the influenza epidemic of 1918 and represented the U.S. at International Red Cross meetings. Wald also took on major industries, lobbying for health inspections of the workplace in order to protect workers. She also advocated that employers protecting the health of their employees made good business sense. She encouraged them to implement preventive medicine and to have nursing or medical professionals on the work site at all times. In 1910, as a result of a series of nursing lectures she organized, Teachers College of Columbia University established a department of nursing and health. The National Organization for Public Health Nursing, an association for a profession she herself had founded, chose Wald as its first president in 1912. Another of her major achievements was persuading Columbia University to appoint the first professor of nursing at a U.S. college or university. Until that time, nursing had been taught in hospitals and consisted largely of supervised work experience. Thanks to Wald, most nursing education now takes place in universities, augmented by practical experience in a teaching hospital.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:17:58 +0000