Mary Sewall Gardner

Mary Sewall Gardner (1871 to 1961) was an American nurse who built much of the organizational groundwork of public health nursing in the United States. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, she trained at the Newport Hospital Training School for Nurses and graduated in 1905. She then spent twenty-six years with the Providence District Nursing Association, first as superintendent and later as director, where she pressed for nurses who cared for children, for safe milk for families who could not buy it, and for a register of clean milk suppliers; the association's work coincided with a fall in Providence infant mortality from 142 to 102 per thousand between 1907 and 1917. In 1912 she and Lillian Wald organized the National Organization for Public Health Nursing, and in 1916 she wrote Public Health Nursing, described as the first American text on the subject. In 1918 she served as chief nurse of the American Red Cross Tuberculosis Commission for Italy. Brown University gave her an honorary master's degree, she received the Walter Burns Saunders Medal, and the American Nurses Association inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 1986.