suffering, but every amelioration." As a source for her motivation to work with incurable impoverished people, she cited the story of a young seamstress who was too poor to afford medical treatment and instead had herself admitted to an institution for the insane on Blackwell's Island. In the summer of 1896, Hawthorne trained as a nurse at the then–New York Cancer Hospital, the first institution in the United States to provide training in treating cancer at a time when general hospitals in the city did not admit patients with cancer. Later that year, she founded a charitable organization named after Rose of Lima, Sister Rose's Free Home, to care for impoverished cancer patients. At first, she visited patients at their homes. In October 1896, she rented three rooms in a tenement on Scammel Street on the Lower East Side, a poor immigrant neighborhood, with the help of an assistant named Alice Huber. A Dominican priest, Clement Thuente, witnessed their work in February 1899 and encouraged them to join the Dominican order as tertiaries (Third Order Dominicans). On December 8, 1900, Hawthorne founded a new religious order, with the approval of Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan of New York. The order was named the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer; she became its first Mother Superior, with the name Mother Mary Alphonsa. Alice became known as Mother Rose. The order—now known as the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne—opened a facility called St. Rose's Home on Water Street in Manhattan; it then moved to Cherry Street, before settling north of New York City in what is now Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne. Hawthorne's brother, Julian, considered her decision to be a martyrdom, writing, "Nothing less than the extreme would satisfy her thirst for self-sacrifice." When he was imprisoned for mail fraud, she traveled to Washington, D.C., on April 3, 1913, to ask President Woodrow Wilson to pardon him. Julian was angered by her intervention, and no pardon was granted. Death and legacy On July 8, 1926, Hawthorne wrote various letters asking for donations until nearly 10 o'clock before going to bed. She died in her sleep on July 9, the day that would have been her parents' 84th wedding anniversary. She was buried on the grounds of the motherhouse of the Dominican Sisters in Hawthorne, N.Y. Hawthorne received a medal from the National Institute of Social Sciences for "notable achievement" in 1914. In 1925,