As a child, Wald had a chronic respiratory problem and spent months in the hospital, leading her to a career: nursing.
She rose to become dean of the Yale University School of Nursing. But she is better known for what she did after hearing a 1963 lecture by British physician Dame Cicely Saunders, about her plans to open the world’s first hospice, in England. “She blew me away,” Wald said later. “Until then, I had thought nurses were the only people troubled by how a terminal illness was treated.” At the time, she said, “terminally ill patients went through hell, and the family was never involved. No one accepted that life cannot go on ad infinitum.”
She resigned as Yale’s dean and went to Saunders’ hospice for training, then returned to Connecticut to work on bringing hospice care to the United States. She succeeded in 1974, helping to open the Connecticut Hospice. Today, there are more than 3,000 hospice programs in the U.S. which help about 900,000 patients a year. Wald was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1998, named a Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing, and received the Founder’s Award of the American Hospice Association. She died at home November 8 at 91.
Note: For more on the birth of the Hospice movement, see
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (Volume 3)
- Zelda Foster (Volume 3)
- William Lamers Jr. (Volume 5)
- Sherwin Nuland (Volume 6)
- Kirsty Howard (Volume 6)
- Balfour Mount (Volume 11)