Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement (1893) in New
York city, invented the term public health nursing to put emphasis on the
community value of the nurse whose work was built upon an
understanding of all the problems that invariably accompanied the ills of
the poor. Wald’s practice among the sick poor quickly convinced her that
their diseases most often resulted from causes beyond an individual’s
control and that treatments needed to be prescribed in an all-round way
with consideration for the social, economic, and medical aspects of each
case. By looking at nursing practice from the patient’s point of view,
encouraging personal and public responsibility, and providing a unifying
structure for the delivery of comprehensive, equally available health care,
Wald conceptualized a new paradigm for nursing practice.