Lillian Wald (1867-1940), American social worker, nurse, pacifist, and reformer, founded one of the first great American settlement houses.

Lillian Wald was born on March 10, 1867, in Cincinnati. Her father, a dealer in optical goods, moved often, but she thought of Rochester, N.Y., where she was privately educated, as her hometown. In 1891 she graduated from the School of Nursing at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. After a year's work in a juvenile asylum, she entered the Women's Medical College. While a medical student she was asked to teach home nursing in New York City's East Side, then the most congested residential area in the world. The need of the immigrants living there was so great and the medical care available to them so slight that Wald abandoned her career and with another student took up residence on the East Side in 1893. Their tenement flat was the place...