On February 13, 2010, Dr. Karen Buhler-Wilkerson succumbed to complications of ovarian cancer following a 5-year battle with the disease. The home care community, specifically the home care community of nurses, lost a great scholar and contributor to the discipline. Karen was one of the few nurses who focused her attention on home care at a time when home care was neither mainstream nor chic. Yet her historical research on the early days of home care nursing is both elegant and passionate, leaving the reader humbled by the impact that our early ancestors in home care nursing had on their community.

Karen was a professor of community health in the School of Nursing at The University of Pennsylvania from 1972 until her death. With over 40 publications and 3 books, Karen was a prolific author. But, she is best known for her award-winning book entitled No Place like Home: A History of Nursing and Home Care in the United States (2001), which details the early history of home care nurses in America. I first became acquainted with Karen's historical research in 1993 when I read her description of the history of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York in "The Call to the Nurse: Healing at home: Visiting Nurse Service of New York, 1893-1993." Her descriptions of the community provide powerful images of what life was like at a desperate time for many immigrants in New York City. She demonstrated the deep and sustaining impact that committed public health nurses can have on a population and made me proud of my heritage as a visiting nurse. Anyone reading her words could be nothing less than proud of home care nurses' contributions to the health of communities.

But Karen did not only look to the past to make her impact on home care, she worked to create a new model of care to improve the lives of people receiving care in their homes. Karen was instrumental in the founding of Penn Nursing's LIFE (Living Independently for Elders) Program, a model program to provide home care to the poor and frail residents of West Philadelphia who would have to live in a nursing home without these services. She recognized the importance of coordinated nursing care to the lives of the elderly in the community and worked to develop a program to provide help and hope to an often ignored population. The LIFE program celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2009 and continues as the only university-based PACE (Program for All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly) Program in the country.

Her awards and honors are too numerous to cite; her impact on students and proteges is too vast to quantify; and her contributions to nursing are too significant to put into words, yet, she will always be known to her home care colleagues as one of the great thought leaders in our discipline. She looked forward in home care, sometimes by looking back on our history, but mostly by recognizing the importance of caring for the most vulnerable among us. She spent a career examining the past in hopes of defining and shaping the future for the profession of home care nursing. For that, all of us in home care nursing will always be grateful.

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