(Rose Hawthorne)
In the fall of 1896, after having taken a three-month nursing course at New York's Cancer Hospital, Rose Hawthorne moved into a three-room cold-water flat on New York City's impoverished Lower East Side and began to nurse the poor with incurable cancer.
She said at the time: No description had given me a real knowledge of how dark the passages are in the daytime, how miserably inadequate the water supply, how impossible that the masses of poor in tenements should keep themselves or their quarters clean.But keeping her focus on God, she resolved ... to take the lowest class we know both in poverty and suffering and put them in such a condition, that if our Lord knocked at the door we should not be ashamed to show what we have done.
In November of 1897, Alice Huber was stirred by a newspaper article written by Rose about caring for the cancerous poor, which closed with: Let the woman who begs for care have comfort, and bestow on this representative of Christ a little gentle attention until she dies. This is all, yet it requires the sacrifice of your life. But that is why Christ asked it, and blesses with unending reward the simple choice.
Soon after reading the article, Alice visited the tenement on Water Street. A fair, bright-faced woman, who was bending over an old woman bandaging up her leg, rose from her work and came forward to meet me. I looked at her as she stood there, the only bright being in all that mass of ugliness and misery. As I looked at her, a great feeling of affection and pity came into my heart for her. So, at last I mustered up courage and offered to help her one afternoon of each week.
On March 24, 1898, Alice joined Rose in her work. After a few short days she realized ... the sacrifice of life Rose Hawthorne was leading. We had not time for reading. I could not write, not even think for a time, the change was so great, the noise and confusion unbearable. I became extremely homesick and shed so many tears ...