Florence Wald
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| Branford resident, founder of the US hospice movement, former dean of the Yale University School of Nursing.
Born in New York City, Florence Schorske Wald and her brother credit their parents with giving them a strong educational foundation in the arts and the tenets of social democracy. Wald received her B.A. in physiology and sociology from Mt. Holyoke College and her M.N. and M.S. from Yale University.
She began her nursing career at the Henry Street Settlement in New York and served in the Signal Corps during World War II. After teaching at the Rutgers School of Nursing from 1955-57, Wald came to Yale as director of the Mental Health and Psychiatric Nursing Program. She was promoted to associate professor and Dean in 1958. Wald resigned from the Deanship in 1968 to study the British approach to care for the terminally ill, but continued as a research associate and member of the clinical nursing faculty. She was promoted to full professor in 1980. Wald's interest in the movement to provide more humane care for the dying was stimulated by the pioneering work of Dr. Cicely Saunders, medical director of the St. Christopher's Hospice in London. Wald invited Saunders to speak at Yale in 1961and then brought her back in 1966 along with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the best-known American proponent of humanizing death. After six weeks in England, Wald joined two pediatricians and the Yale medical center chaplain to create the first U.S. hospice facility, which opened in Branford, not far from Wald's home, in 1971. Since the 1960's Wald has continued to speak out against overmedication of the elderly and overemphasis on technology in the treatment of cancer patients. She has published countless articles and book chapters on hospice care and on the training of nurses. Wald believes that nurses should work in the community and administer to patients' needs from birth to death, that they should work in soup kitchens as well as hospitals, as she herself had done early in her career. She is also working to set up hospice units in American prisons. Wald has received honorary doctorates from Mt. Holyoke, the University of Bridgeport, and Yale University. She was named Distinguished Woman of Connecticut by Governor Ella Grasso and was inducted in the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1998. She is the wife of Henry Wald, an architect and engineer, and the mother of a son, Joel and a daughter, Shari. | |||||||||||
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