Cancer. Does the thought of it send an uneasy ripple through your mind? Difficult as it is today, imagine what it was like in the 1800s. People falsely believed it was contagious. They thought you could catch cancer from others. This fear made them do awful things.

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop listened aghast to Rev. Alfred Young. The story he told was of a young seamstress, a sensitive and cultured woman, who took ill of cancer. Terrified, her landlady threw her out of her room. The girl's life savings were eaten up in a hopeless search for a cure. A private hospital sent her to the city hospital. The city hospital packed her off to a poorhouse on Blackwell Island. Alone and friendless, thrown among criminals and brutes, she died in despair. Her body was dumped into a pauper's grave.

"God Help Me to Help Them."
Back in her room, Rose mourned over what she had just heard. She was no stranger to sorrow herself. In 1881, her only child, Francie, died, just five years old. Later her marriage broke on the rocks of her husband's alcoholism. But her own woes seemed minor in light of the story she had just heard. Surely Christ expected her to do something!

Rose fell to her knees in tears and prayed, "God help me to help them."

"A fire was then lighted in my heart, where it still burns," she wrote many years later. Thanks in large measure to Rose, stories like that of the little seamstress are not commonplace today.

Lady Friends
Rose knew that cancer struck terror into the hearts of rich and poor alike. Her friend, Emma Lazarus, had died of cancer. Emma was the author of the words on the Statue of Liberty, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...." Emma's end was eased by all the comforts that money could buy and the love of a caring family. Yet pain tightened her lips, and an unpleasant odor hung over her room. Rose agonized in thinking, What must cancer be like for the poor who had no family, no comforts, no money?

A plan formed in Rose's mind. Although she was next door to poverty herself, she would rent cheap rooms in the poorest part of town. There she would offer free nursing to poor and homeless women.

A Dirty Job for One So Delicately Bred
Rose was practical. She knew next to nothing about treating cancer, so she volunteered at a hospital where she could learn bandaging and other skills. As her fingers plucked at the gauze and she lifted off her first bandage, she stared into a face eaten away by cancer. The sight so shocked her that it took all of her resolution to stick to her plan. Mustering her courage, she overcame her horror and in a few weeks was able to do the job without shrinking back.

What made you "choose such an awful occupation?" asked friends. It was a good question. Well-born and cultured, Rose had moved in the highest literary circles of New England and New York. Her father was the famed novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter. Rose seemed destined to follow in his steps. Her stories appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and St. Nicholas magazines, and she published a volume of poems, Along the Shore. She gave up all of this when she took a house in the slums to change icky bandages. She wrote again but only to fund her work and promote it through a paper called Christ's Poor.

A Rose Among Thorns
Rose's first cancer home was a three-room slum apartment in New York City that sat between horse stables. The street was noisy, the work exhausting. But from that humble beginning, a great work was built.