Goldin, Grace

Wife of Judah Golden.

Grace Goldin was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where her father was a businessman. She studied at Barnard College, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English literature in 1937. She moved to Connecticut when her husband, Judah Goldin, accepted an appointment as Professor of Jewish Studies at Yale University in 1958. A few years after arriving in New Haven, in the early 1960s, she became involved in the history of hospitals while working as a research assistant to John D. Thompson, professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale, who was studying the characteristics of good nursing wards. The two collaborated on a history of hospital architecture, The Hospital: A Social and Architectural History, published by Yale University Press in 1975. From this work, Goldin cultivated an interest of her own in hospitals and hospices. She took photographs through much of Europe and in several cities in the United States, and spent a considerable amount of time visiting and corresponding with Cicely Saunders of St. Christopher's Hospice in London. These decades of work culminated in the publication of Work of Mercy: A Picture History of Hospitals (Erin, Ontario: The Boston Mills Press, 1994). Grace Goldin's work was not limited to the history of hospitals; in the years before and following that research she also proved herself to be an accomplished poet. She spent the last years of her life in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where she died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of seventy-eight in July 1995.