Besides hospice workers and Mother Teresa, Rose Lathrop is remembered among those who cared for the cancerous poor. And she chose to sacrifice a comfortable life and a literary career.
Rose Hawthorne was the daughter of the famous novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter. She ran in the highest literary circles of New England and New York in the 1870’s. Her stories had been published in the Atlantic Monthly and St. Nicholas magazines. Her poems in a book Along the Shore.
Rose married and had a daughter, but in 1881, her daughter died at age 5. Then her marriage failed because of her husband’s alcoholism. Though these were terrible enough to bear, Rose knew Christ wanted her to do something with her life.
She heard about a young woman, sick with cancer, who had been thrown out of her home and hospitals to die in the Blackwell Island poorhouse. Her body was buried along with criminals in the paupers’ gravesite.
When Rose was young, her father took her to a poorhouse to show her how others lived. When a diseased child held out his hands, her father picked up the boy and caressed him. After they left, her father told Rose he felt as if God had promised the boy that kindness, and he could never again call himself a man if he hadn’t held the boy.
On her knees, Rose prayed, “God help me to help them (the poor people with cancer).”
Rose’s friend, Emma Lazarus, learned she had cancer. Emma, who had written the words on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses . . . ,” could afford whatever comforts money could buy. Also her family and friends cared for her continually during her illness. Yet, Rose noticed the pain still tightened on her lips and an unpleasant odor hung over Emma’s room.
Rose found cheap rooms to rent in the poorest part of New York in which to nurse the sick. Then she volunteered at a hospital to learn how to bandage and other nursing skills. Her first home contained three rooms in a slum apartment situated between horse stables. The noise was constant, the work exhausting, and the air a bit stinky.
Rose’s first live-in patient was Mrs. Watson, an Irish woman with face cancer who complained diligently. Mrs. Watson’s grandson had been in trouble with the police, so Rose sent him away. But Mrs. Watson pleaded with Rose to let him return. After Mrs. Watson’s death, Rose wrote humbly, “As I sat by her simple black coffin in our shanty room . . . , I had no thought for anything but the fact that I was a poor friend to the poor, a heartless judge of a kinder heart than my own, and a darker failure in better light than the woman who had often prayed for me and never injured me in the least.”
Three years later on December 8, 1900, Rose and Alice Huber established The Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer. Their work grew and moved several times.
Someone offered an old hotel on nine acres in Hawthorne, New York. The town had been named Sherman Hills. Today the women there operate seven cancer homes in six states, and they serve the poorest incurable cancer patients of all races and religions.
By her death in 1926, Rose Lathrop had served the poor in Jesus Christ’s name for thirty years in cancer work.
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