Source: https://www.renegadetribune.com/jewish-invention-myths-public-health-nursing/
by Karl Radl
Another ‘jewish invention’ myth that gets bandied about a fair amount is the claim that jews originated the concept of ‘Public Health Nursing’ – basically nurses getting out into the community to offer basic medical advice and help as well as try to engage in preventative medicine – with the claim being that it was created by the jewess Lillian Wald in 1893 in New York City. (1)
The usual story is well explained by the University of Pennsylvania when we read on their website how in 1895:
‘Lillian Wald establishes the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City
Wald’s insistence that sickness should be considered in its social and economic context led to innovative and pragmatic reforms in health care, industry, education, recreation, and housing. She coined the term public health nurse and originated the ideas that eventually led to the establishment of the Children’s Bureau, the provision of school nurses in primary and secondary schools, insurance coverage for home care, and the first national nursing service: the Red Cross Town and Country Nursing Service.’ (2)
This was then preceded by Wald and her non-jewish friend and fellow nurse Mary Brewster setting up the ‘Visiting Nurse Service’ in 1893 which Wald styled ‘public health nursing’. (3)
This seems solid until we realise that while Wald was the first person to call what she and Brewster were doing ‘public health nursing’; they were most certainly not the first people to be doing it.
For example, the ‘New York Mission and Tract Society’ had been doing home evangelization visits in the city since the 1830s, (4) but in 1877 they added in what amounts to public health nursing as part of their evangelization campaign to the poor and the destitute across the cites of Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York as the University of Pennsylvania also explains:
‘Women’s Branch of the New York Mission and Tract Society sends the first trained nurses into the homes of the poor to care for the sick
These missionary nurses were followed in the 1880s by visiting nurses sponsored by organizations in Buffalo, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. By 1909, there were nearly 600 visiting nurse organizations across the country to save the poor from illness.’ (5)
Now this means that nursing of the kind later proposed and performed by Brewster and Wald was in fact already being done circa sixteen years before they started their own work in 1893 and the only thing that Wald actually ‘invented’ was the term ‘public health nursing’ in order to describe this already extant profession!
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References
(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/Jewish/comments/18q24ls/what_are_some_things_that_were_invented_by_jews/
(2) https://www.nursing.upenn.edu/nhhc/nursing-through-time/1870-1899/
(3) https://jwa.org/womenofvalor/wald
(4) https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-York-City-Mission-and-Tract-Society
(5) https://www.nursing.upenn.edu/nhhc/nursing-through-time/1870-1899/
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