New Deal Accomplishment: Over 8 million free home-nursing visits for Americans in need

Above: Home-visits by nurses do not seem to have been a large part of the Civil Works Administration (CWA) program, but there were still significant projects, such as this home-visit campaign in Wilmington, Delaware, to get children immunized against diphtheria, 1934. Diphtheria was once a major cause of death among children in the United States: "Until treatment became widely available in the 1920s, the public viewed this disease as a death sentence" (Case Western Reserve University). Newspaper excerpt from the Wilmington Morning News, March 14, 1934. Image from newspapers.com, used here for educational and non-commercial purposes.

Above: Public health nurses, funded by the Work Division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), made 3,530,000 home visits to Americans in need of healthcare assistance. The nurse above is assisting someone recovering from mastoiditis, between 1934 and 1935. Mastoiditis is an infection of the mastoid bone (behind the ear), stemming from an ear infection. Untreated, mastoiditis can cause facial paralysis, hearing loss, brain swelling, and even septic shock and death. Photo and statistic from the final report of FERA's Work Division.

Above: This WPA nurse is helping a man with pneumonia, in his home in Amsterdam, New York, between 1935 and 1943. During the first three years of the WPA program, fiscal years 1936-1938, WPA nurses made 4,737,000 home visits to ill Americans (Federal Works Agency, Work Projects Administration, Report on Progress of the WPA Program, June 30, 1939, p. 24). Photo from the National Archives.

Above: The WPA organized Minnesota's first rural bedside nursing program. In an article accompanying these photos, we learn that "A large number of old-age pension couples are being helped thru this WPA project. Alone and almost forgotten, these elderly men and women, many of them suffering silently from some wasting disease, are having their last moments made more bearable thru sympathetic care" ("WPA Nursing Service Watches Over Helpless, Aged in County," Daily Times and Daily Journal-Press (St. Cloud, Minnesota), October 29, 1936, p. 3). Image from newspapers.com, used here for educational and non-commercial purposes.

Above: A newspaper clipping from the Lincoln Sunday Journal and Star (Lincoln, Nebraska), October 4, 1936. Ellen Woodward, head of the WPA's Division of Women’s and Professional Projects explained that "Under the Works Progress Administration Nursing and Public Health Program, needy registered nurses are employed to provide free bedside care in underprivileged families. On the advice of physicians, they go into needy homes to assist in providing prenatal and postnatal care and to render nursing service in other cases of illness. Their duties consist of such tasks as bathing and dressing patients, preparing proper foods, and rendering other services which come under the general head of bedside nursing" ("The WPA and Nursing," The American Journal of Nursing, Vol. 37, No. 9, September 1937, p. 994). Image above from newspapers.com, used here for educational and non-commercial purposes.

Above: A WPA nurse visits a family in New Orleans, September, 1936. During this time, about 6,000 graduate nurses--all across the country--were employed by the WPA to freely assist Americans who needed healthcare assistance ("WPA Projects for Registered Nurses," The American Journal of Nursing, Vol. 37, No. 1, January 1937, p. 35). Adjusted for population growth, that would be about 15,600 graduate nurses today. Imagine 15,600 nurses scouring the countryside, looking for Americans in need of help, to provide healthcare service at no charge. In addition to that, there were registered nurses who had been laid off who were hired by WPA too (see caption for previous photo), probably many thousands (exact nationwide totals are hard to come by, but see "Nursing and the New Deal: We Met the Challenge," 6th page). This great hiring of the unemployed, to provide healthcare for the needy, can be viewed as the full activation of the General Welfare clause of the U.S. Constitution - a clause modern America, sadly, often pretends doesn't exist or has no meaning. Photo from the National Archives.

Above: Another WPA nurse scene from New Orleans, ca. 1936. In a 1939 radio address, WPA Assistant Administrator Florence Kerr said, "[The WPA] is ready with the workers to help public-spirited citizens make their communities better places to live in. People in this country do not need to take their desires for better sanitation out in merely wishing... They do not need merely to wish that it were unnecessary for thousands of cases of serious illness to remain untreated. They can and should see that medical and nursing services are extended to a larger number of people who cannot pay for them" (emphasis added). Nearly 90 years after Kerr's radio address, are we listening to her advice? Photo above from the National Archives.

Above: A patient expresses gratitude for the service and empathy of the WPA nursing program. From The News and Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina), April 9, 1936, p. 4. Image from newspapers.com, used here for educational and non-commercial purposes.

8,000,000+ visits of kindness

It seems that surprisingly little has been written about the New Deal's nursing programs, and cumulative statistics are not readily available. But from the information I've included above, we can see that the New Deal provided over 8 million home-nursing visits to Americans in need of healthcare. And more than that, the New Deal nursing programs--in both their home visit and clinical settings--greatly influenced the development of community health:

"The New Deal nurses worked on the front line to bring the hopes and dreams of social reform to the average citizen. If their work had not been needed, and well-performed, taxpayers would not have supported the expansion of these programs over the next half century. Nurses, physicians, and allied health professionals currently involved in community health owe a debt to these unsung heroines of the 1930s" (Phoebe Ann Pollitt and Camille Reese, “Nursing and the New Deal: We Met the Challenge,” Public Health Nursing, 14 (6), December, 1997).