Henry Street Settlement

The Henry Street Settlement began with a singular, rainy encounter in eighteen ninety-three. Lillian Wald, a young nurse, was teaching a home nursing class on the Lower East Side when a child led her to a nearby tenement. There, she found a woman in desperate need of medical care after childbirth, a situation that convinced Wald to move into the neighborhood herself. She abandoned the traditional hospital model to live among the people she served, coining the term public health nurse to define her radical new approach of bringing medical care directly to the home.