“The life of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop is among the genuinely dramatic personal chronicles of our time. As the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and as founder of the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer… she has been a good deal written about, and the contrasts of her been a good deal written about, and the contrasts of her life stressed… But the most impressively dramatic, as well as the most valiant and self-denying, years in Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s long and busy life were those that lay between the delightful literary atmosphere of her childhood and youth, and the successful philanthropy that crowned the effort of her maturity. The greatest human interest, the most influential social importance, and the core of stupendous adventure in her career lay precisely in the years when, unheralded, discouraged, and sometimes criticized and opposed, she… went to live alone in poverty among the poor who were dying in dirt and squalor of horrible disease.
“…Rose Hawthorne did not take, naturally to what we now call ‘social work’. She hated ugliness and dirt and sordidness and even the sight of disease and pain. As a child she was dainty and imperious, as a girl beauty-loving and temperamental, fastidious and a little remote …