Lillian Wald

An American nurse and social reformer who founded American public health nursing. In 1893 Wald established the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan's Lower East Side, providing home nursing care to poor immigrant families regardless of their ability to pay, and the visiting nurse service she built there grew into the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. Wald coined the term public health nurse to describe this new kind of practice, embedded directly in the community rather than confined to a hospital, and successfully pressed New York City's Board of Health to place nurses in public schools, creating the first public school nursing system in the world. Beyond nursing, she was active in broader reform movements, helping found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Women's Trade Union League.