Meet Lillian Wald (1867 - 1940). After growing up in Ohio and New York, Wald became a nurse. She bri

Meet Lillian Wald (1867 - 1940). After growing up in Ohio and New York, Wald became a nurse. She briefly attended medical school and began to teach community health classes while attending classes. One day in 1892, she was approached by a young girl who kept repeating “mommy … baby … blood”. Wald gathered some sheets from her bed-making lesson and followed the child to her home, a cramped two-room tenement apartment. Inside, she found the child’s mother who had recently given birth and needed medical treatment. The doctor tending to her had left because she could not afford to pay him. This was Wald’s first experience with poverty; she called the episode her “baptism by fire” and dedicated herself to bringing nursing care, and eventually education and access to the arts, to the immigrant poor on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Lillian D. Wald started the Visiting Nurse Service in 1893, and two years later she opened the Henry Street Settlement. The Henry Street Settlement was initially named the Nurses’ Settlement. It was (and remains) not-for-profit social service agency in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It provided both medical care to those who could otherwise not afford it, and a social center with a gymnasium added in 1895. Wald also worked on behalf of women’s rights and the welfare of children, establishing the Women’s Trade Union League and spearheaded a federal organization to help children. After years lobbying for this idea, the Children’s Bureau was established in 1912. -- source link

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