Susan Elizabeth Tracy

Susan Edith Tracy (January 22, 1864 – September 12, 1928) was an American registered nurse who developed invalid occupations (i.e. occupations for invalids) as a branch of nursing. :118 Tracy was a founder member of the National Society for the Promotion of Occupational Therapy. She was an educator and author, instigating the first training course about occupation and writing the first textbook about the therapeutic benefits of occupation.

Early life Tracy was the youngest child of Cyrus Mason Tracy (1824–1891) and Caroline Mary Tracy, née Needham (1824–1889). The Tracy family lived in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her father was a botanist and professor of medical material at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy. Tracy had two sisters and a brother: Laura Caroline Hosmer, née Tracy (1850–1937), George Lowell (1855–1921) and Julia Mason Nutting, née Tracy (1858–1942). Her parents and brother were musical. Cyrus was an amateur composer and flautist; her mother was a pianist who sang in her church's choir. Her brother George Lowell Tracy was a composer, conductor, arranger, and instructor. Tracy attributed her skills in many crafts to learning beside her mother as a child. :16 Tracy studied at the Teachers College, Columbia University, New York in 1905, attending courses in crafts and hospital economics. :16

In 1906 Tracy introduced the study of occupation into the nursing curriculum at the Training School. Students completed a one-hour course for ten weeks where they worked with ten ‘representative patients taking them as we find them’ and learned to do many things. This was likely to benefit ‘the public to whom we send our graduates’. :1111

Invalid occupations Tracy developed the concept of invalid occupations, which encompassed any purposeful, orderly activity of the mind and body. She theorised, taught, investigated and published about this treatment. Tracy believed that ‘the holding of the mind to a normal pursuit is favourable to improvement or even recovery’. :765

Tracy wrote some of the earliest analyses of therapeutic occupation. In 1907, her article 'Some Profitable Occupations for Invalids' was published in the American Journal of Nursing. She distinguished between ‘amusements (which) serve to pass time away’ and ‘occupations (that) treasure and redeem the time’. when she compared the tools, methods and benefits of rake knitting with knitting with needles. ‘Rake knitting requires little more than finger motion, so that a patient who is extensively paralyzed can carry on this form of knitting … (whereas) common knitting done by a patient on her back in bed requires a raising of the elbows at each stitch, which adds much to the fatigue of the process’. :7

Her book, Studies in Invalid Occupation. A Manual for Nurses and Attendants (1910), was the first textbook on the subject. She advocated learning by doing and through experience, following the concepts of John Dewey :495 Tracy's book was reprinted and widely used until at least 1940.

In 1912 Tracy left the Adams-Nervine Asylum to set up the Experiment Station for the Study of Invalid Occupations in Jamaica Plain, Boston. This was a resource centre with case studies and information; and a venue for courses, demonstrations, exhibitions and private instruction. She was teaching occupations courses for nurses in Chicago. Tracy was one of five members of the Board of Management and chairman of the Committee of Teaching Methods. :64

The Board of Management of the American Occupational Therapy Association noted that Tracy was ‘one of the incorporators of this association and a pioneer in occupational therapy’