Lillian D. Wald
American Nurse & Social Reformer
1867-1940 A selection from
THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET
Narrated by Vanessa Hart
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THE EAST SIDE TWO
DECADES AGO
A sick woman in a squalid rear tenement,
so wretched and so pitiful that, in all the
years since, I have not seen anything more appealing, determined me, within half an hour,
to live on the East Side.
I had spent two years in a New York training-school for nurses; strenuous years for an
undisciplined, untrained girl, but a wonderful
human experience. After graduation, I supplemented the theoretical instruction, which
was casual and inconsequential in the hospital
classes twenty-five years ago, by a period of
study at a medical college. It was while at
the: college that a great opportunity came
to me.
I had little more than an inspiration to be
of use in some way or somehow, and going
to the hospital seemed the readiest means of
realizing my desire. While there, the long
hours “on duty '' and the exhausting demands
of the ward work scarcely admitted freedom
for keeping informed as to what was happening in the world outside. The nurses had no
time for general reading; visits to and from
friends were brief; we were out of the current
and saw little of life save as it flowed into the
hospital wards. It is not strange, therefore,
that I should have been ignorant of the various
movements which reflected the awakening of
the social conscience at the time, or of the birth
of the “settlement'' which twenty-five years
ago was giving form to a social protest in England and America. Indeed, it was not until
the plan of our work on the East Side was well
developed that knowledge came to me of other
groups of people who, reacting to a humane or
an academic appeal, were adopting this mode
of expression and calling it a “settlement.''
Two decades ago the words “East Side ''
called up a vague and alarming picture of
something strange and alien: a vast crowded
area, a foreign city within our own, for whose
conditions we had no concern. Aside from its
exploiters, political and economic, few people
had any definite knowledge of it, and its literary if discovery '' had but just begun.
The lower East Side then rejected the popular indifference — it almost seemed contempt —
for the living conditions of a huge population.
And the possibility of improvement seemed,
when my inexperience was startled into
thought, the more remote because of the dumb
acceptance of these conditions by the East
Side itself. Like the rest of the world I had
known little of it, when friends of a philanthropic institution asked me to do something
for that quarter.
Remembering the families who came to
visit patients in the wards, I outlined a course
of instruction in home nursing adapted to their
needs, and gave it in an old building in Henry
Street, then used as a technical school and now
part of the settlement. Henry Street then as now
was the center of a dense industrial population.
From the schoolroom where I had been giving a lesson in bed-making, a little girl led
me one drizzling March morning. She had
told me of her sick mother, and gathering from
her incoherent account that a child had been
born, I caught up the paraphernalia of the
bed-making lesson and carried it with me.
The child led me over broken roadways, —
there was no asphalt, although its use was
well established in other parts of the city —
over dirty mattresses and heaps of refuse — it
was before Colonel Waring had shown the possibility of clean streets even in that quarter —
between tall, reeking houses whose laden fire-
escapes, useless for their appointed purpose,
bulged with household goods of every description. The rain added to the dismal appearance
of the streets and to the discomfort of the crowds
which thronged them, intensifying the odors
which assailed me from every side. Through
Hester and Division streets we went to the end
of Ludlow; past odorous fish-stands, for the
streets were a market-place, unregulated, unsupervised, unclean; past evil smelling, uncovered
garbage cans; and — perhaps worst of all, where
so many little children played — past the trucks
brought down from more fastidious quarters
and stalled on these already overcrowded
streets, lending themselves inevitably to many
forms of indecency.
The child led me on through a tenement
hallway, across a court where open and un-
screened closets were promiscuously used by
men and women, up into a rear tenement, by
slimy steps whose accumulated dirt was augmented that day by the mud of the streets,
and finally into the sickroom.
All the maladjustments of our social and
economic relations seemed epitomized in this
brief journey and what was found at the end
of it. The family to which the child led me
was neither criminal nor vicious. Although
the husband was a cripple, one of those who
stand on street corners exhibiting deformities
to enlist compassion, and masking the begging
of alms by a pretense at selling; although the
family of seven shared their two rooms with
boarders, — who were literally boarders, since
a piece of timber was placed over the floor for
them to sleep on, — and although the sick
woman lay on a wretched, unclean bed, soiled
with a hemorrhage two days old, they were
not degraded human beings, judged by any
measure of moral values.
In fact, it was very plain that they were
sensitive to their condition, and when, at the
end of my ministrations, they kissed my hands
(those who have undergone similar experiences
will, 1 am sure, understand), it would have
been some solace if by any conviction of the
moral unworthiness of the family I could have
defended myself as a part of a society which
permitted such conditions to exist. Indeed,
my subsequent acquaintance with them revealed the fact that, miserable as their state
was, they were not without ideals for the family
life, and for society, of which they were so unloved and unlovely a part.
That morning's experience was a baptism of
fire. Deserted were the laboratory and the
academic work of the college. I never returned to them. On my way from the sick-
room to my comfortable student quarters my
mind was intent on my own responsibility. To
my inexperience it seemed certain that conditions such as these were allowed because
people did not know, and for me there was a
challenge to know and to tell. When early
morning found me still awake, my naive con-
viction remained that, if people knew things, —
and "things" meant everything implied in the
condition of this family — such horrors would
cease to exist, and I rejoiced that I had had a
training in the care of the sick that in itself would
give me an organic relationship to the neighborhood in which this awakening had come. More information about Lillian D. Wald from Wikipedia
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