Florence S. Wald, Who Eased the Pain of the Dying, Is Dead at 91

by sara star | November 15, 2008 at 11:33 am

129 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

Up until 1969, doctors rarely talked to their patients about dying. When Dr Kubler-Ross first started interviewing dying patients, "none were to be found". Doctors rarely told their patients that they were dying. Doctors were taught to save lives, not to help people with their natural final stage of life called death. Five years later, Florence Wald, a nurse, was the force behind opening the first hospice care unit, where patients could die more comfortably and with dignity.

Florence S. Wald, whose vision of bringing the terminally ill peace of mind and, to whatever extent possible, freedom from pain led to the opening of the first palliative care
Mrs. Wald, who was dean of the Yale University School of Nursing from 1959 to 1966, was the prime mover, in 1974, in starting the Connecticut Hospice, the nation’s first home-care program for the terminally ill. Six years later, a 44-patient hospice — where the dying could be comforted by their loved ones around the clock and where the staff would do what it could to alleviate suffering — opened in Branford.

“This hospice became a model for hospice care in the United States and abroad,” the publication Yale Nursing Matters said this week, adding that Mrs. Wald’s role “in reshaping nursing education to focus on patients and their families has changed the perception of care for the dying in this country.” ...

In 1963, a friend at Yale persuaded Mrs. Wald to attend a lecture by Dame Cicely Saunders, a British physician who was then planning to open the world’s first hospice, in Sydenham, south of London. Inspired, Mrs. Wald soon resigned as dean of the Yale nursing school to work on creating a similar center in the United States. She was troubled by a medical ethic that insisted on procedure after procedure.

“In those days, terminally ill patients went through hell, and the family was never involved,” she said. “No one accepted that life cannot go on ad infinitum.”