Florence Wald gave up the deanship of one of the best nursing schools in the country because she had decided that American medicine was handling death badly and that she wanted to work on it. Hospice care in the United States starts with her.
Yale
Wald was born Florence Sophie Schorske in New York on April 19, 1917. She was a sickly child who spent long stretches in hospital, and said afterwards that what she remembered was the nurses.
She took her nursing degree at Yale in 1941, worked in research and in the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, and returned to Yale as an instructor. In 1959 she became dean of the School of Nursing, at forty-two.
The lecture
In 1963 Wald invited an English physician named Cicely Saunders — herself a former nurse — to lecture at Yale on the care of the dying.
Saunders described what would open four years later as St Christopher's Hospice in London: pain controlled properly and pre-emptively rather than rationed, the family treated as part of the unit of care, and dying handled as something to be attended to rather than as a medical failure to be hidden behind a curtain.
American hospitals at the time routinely did not tell patients they were dying, gave opioids sparingly for fear of addiction in people with weeks to live, and had no framework for any of it.
Wald described the lecture as leaving an indelible impression. She spent the next three years unable to let it go.
Resigning
In 1966 she resigned the deanship — an unusual thing to give up, with no post to go to — and spent a month in 1968 working at St Christopher's as a nurse to learn how it was done.
She came back and ran a study of dying patients and their families in New Haven, which is one of the first pieces of American research to ask terminally ill people directly what they wanted. What they said they wanted was to be at home, out of pain, and told the truth.
In 1974, with two chaplains and a paediatrician, Wald opened Connecticut Hospice in Branford — the first hospice in the United States. It began as a home care service, on the finding that people wanted to die at home, and opened a 44-bed inpatient building in 1980.
What followed
Medicare added a hospice benefit in 1982. By the time Wald died there were more than 3,000 hospice programmes in the United States caring for something like 900,000 people a year, and hospice and palliative nursing was a certified specialty.
Wald kept working. In her eighties she researched hospice care inside Connecticut prisons for the National Prison Hospice Association, and argued for training prisoners as hospice volunteers for other prisoners, on the grounds that men dying in custody had nobody else.
She received an honorary doctorate from Yale in 1996 and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1998, and the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1996.
She died at home in Branford, Connecticut on November 8, 2008, at 91.
Related
Sources
- Florence Wald, for the chronology, the 1963 lecture and the founding of Connecticut Hospice. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Florence S. Wald. National Women's Hall of Fame. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Our history. Connecticut Hospice. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- ANA Hall of Fame inductees. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.