INDEX: A History of Care
250 Years of American Need, Service, and Hope

 

ABOUT THIS PROJECT: THE MURAL AND HISTORY’S INSIGHTS

INTRODUCTION

1776–1866: Founding and Fracture

1776-1786

• Continental Congress, Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
• Dr. Benjamin Rush, Directions for Preserving the Health of Soldiers, 1778

1787-1796

• Dr. Benjamin Rush, letter to Reverend Richard Allen, September 1793
• Absalom Jones & Richard Allen, Proceedings of the Black People, Philadelphia, 1794
• United States Congress, An Act Relative to Quarantine, 1796

1797-1806

• United States Congress, Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen, July 16, 1798
• Enslaved Healers and Midwives — Care in the Cabins, Early 1800’s 
• Home Deaths at the Turn of the 19th Century (Late 1700’s-Mid 1800’s)
• Home Parlors and Funerals at the Turn of the 19th Century (Late 1700’s-Mid 1800’s)

1807-1816

• Francis Scott Key, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ September 14, 1814
• Dr. Daniel Drake, Natural and Statistical View, or Picture of Cincinnati, 1815
• Almshouses as Places to Die — Poor Relief and Separation

1817-1826

• New York City Common Council laws regulating funerals of enslaved persons
• Medical Inquiries and Observations, Volume I (circulating in medical schools during this period)
• American School for the Deaf, Hartford, Connecticut, April 15, 1817

1827-1836

• Medical Ethics (circulating in American medical education during this period)
• U.S. Congress, Indian Removal Act, 1830; Cherokee Nation Memorial, 1829, the Trail of Tears
• Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 1845; describing c. 1833-1835

1837-1846

• Joseph Warrington’s Nurse Society of Philadelphia, 1839, “This Room Holds Life and Death”
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever,” 1843
• Dorothea Dix, Petition for the Mentally Ill to the Legislature of Massachusetts, January 1843

1847-1856

• Lemuel Shattuck, Report of the Sanitary Commission of Massachusetts, 1850
• Elizabeth Stanton and delegates of the Seneca Falls Convention, Declaration of Sentiments, 1848
• Sojourner Truth, Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, Akron, 1851 (as recorded by Frances Gage, 1863)
• Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852

1857-1866

• Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society, 1860
• Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser,” written from his wartime nursing experience 1862-1865
• President Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863
• President Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865
• United States Congress, Act Establishing the National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers

1867–1936: INDUSTRIAL AMERICA AND REFORM

1867-1876

• U.S. Congress, Freedmen’s Bureau and the Medical Care of the Formerly Enslaved, 1865–1872
• Embalming and the Rise of the Funeral Profession after the Civil War, c. 1860s-1870s
• U.S. Marine Hospital Service, Reorganization and Supervising Surgeon, 1870–1873
• Poverty and Disease in the Postwar South, 1865–1876

1877-1886

• Clara Barton and the Founding of the American Red Cross, 1881
• Westward Expansion and Displacement, 1870s–1880s — New Starts, Old Wounds
• The Gilded Age & High Society (late 1870s–1890s)

1887-1896

• Lillian Wald, Henry Street Settlement, 1893
• New York State Legislature, State Care Act, 1890
• Emerging U.S. Vital Statistics and Death Registration, 1890s

1897-1906

• Hospital Electrification — Light in the Night, early 1900s
• American Medical Association (AMA) — Council on Medical Education, 1904
• W.E.B. DuBois, The Health and Physique of the Negro American, 1906

1907-1916

• Medical Education in the United States and Canada – A Report to The Carnegie Foundation, 1910
• The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, New York City, Garment District, 1911
• RMS Titanic (1912) and the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS – 1914)

1917-1926

• World War I – Battlefield medicine reshapes American care
• 1918 Spanish flu pandemic in America – Mass suffering and the call to comfort
• Automobiles, telephones, and the shrinking distance to the bedside

1927-1936

• The Great Depression and Lack of Medical Care
• National Negro Health Week and the Shadow of Tuskegee
• The New Deal and a Social Safety Net

1937–1976: WAR, RIGHTS, AND HOSPICE ORIGINS

1937-1946

• 1937–1941: The Gathering Storm
• 1941-1945: America at War – Saving Lives, Counting Losses
• 1945: Liberation and the Holocaust – Witnessing the Unthinkable
• 1945–1946: Aftermath – Wounds Seen and Unseen

1947-1956

• Hill–Burton Act and “Separate but Equal” Hospitals (1946–early 1950s)
• Cicely Saunders, David Tasma, and the Window that Opened Modern Hospice (London, 1948)
• From Home Death to Hospital Death (early mid 1950s)

1957-1966

• 1950s – Baby Boomers and the Promise of a Longer Life
• 1963 – President John F. Kennedy’s Death and Televised Grief
• 1965 – Medicare, Medicaid, and Who Gets Care
• Martin Luther King Jr., speech to the Medical Committee for Human Rights, March 25, 1966

1967-1976

• A world watching death, injustice, and possibility
• 1967, Dame Cicely Saunders opens St. Christopher’s, the first modern hospice
• 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross authors On Death and Dying
• Florence Wald, founder of the first U.S. hospice, 1974

1977–2006: HOSPICE AND PALLIATIVE CARE TAKE SHAPE

1977-1986

• From Margins to Movement (1977–1981)
• The Medicare Hospice Benefit (1982–1984)
• Building Disciplines and Identities (1976–1986)

1987-1996

• AIDS, Activism, and the Edges of Care
• High-Tech Medicine and the Meaning of “Not Yet” (Late 1980s–1990s)
• Pushing Life, Reframing Dying

1997-2006

• Trauma, Responsibility, and the Pursuit of Human Dignity
• Hospice Grows Up
• From Hospice to Hospital Halls: Palliative Care Finds Its Name
• From Experience to Evidence and Education

2007–2026: TRAUMA, EQUITY, AND MORAL DISTRESS

2007-2016

• A Decade We Remember: 2007-2016 in American Life
• From Movement to System: Hospice and Palliative Care Become a Measured Presence
• Care Under Pressure: Different Hospice Models, Different Patterns of Care
• Rewriting the Rules of Access: The Affordable Care Act, Aging, and Serious Illness
• Healing in an Age of Trauma: Repeated Violence, Black Lives, and the Work of Care

2017-2026

• COVID-19: Distance, Disparity, and the Demand for Presence
• “I Can’t Breathe”: Racism, Suffering, and the Work of Care
• Workforce, Moral Distress, and Business Models: Who Stays, Who Leaves, and Who Decides?
• #MeToo and Hidden Caregivers
• Emergency Disasters: Climate Change and Community Violence
• Technology, Data, and the Meaning of Presence: Moving Faster Than Meaning

 

 

EPILOGUE