Lina rogers biography

With school’s start right around the corner, we look back at the invention of the school nurse – now a familiar role occupied by beloved individuals, but a century-old concept begun in America in in New York City, where chronic school absenteeism was a plague.

Why were so many kids absent?

Health authorities who’d begun conducting medical inspections of city schools sent ill children (suffering from everything from rat bites and trachoma to lice, scabies and impetigo to ringworm) home for treatment, with a note to their parents advising they seek medical care before returning to school.

But as many immigrant parents either couldn’t read English, didn’t understand the notes’ significance, or couldn’t afford a visit to a private physician, many kids remained truant for weeks, if not months, unwitting vectors for the transmission of communicable disease.

Lilian Wald, leader of the Henry Street Settlement – who’d tended many immigrant families on the Lower East Side – knew that lack o