“It is really hard,” a colleague said, “to identify anyone who has had a larger impact on nursing than Claire.”Claire M. Fagin, a leading expert on, advocate for and change agent in the profession of nursing, and one of the first women to lead an Ivy League university, the University of Pennsylvania, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 97. Her death was confirmed by her son and only immediate survivor, Charles.Among other achievements, Dr. Fagin was widely credited with overturning the common practice of strictly limiting parental visits to hospitalized children. She was inspired (and infuriated) by what happened in the early 1960s when she and her husband were visiting their young son Joshua, hospitalized for hernia surgery: They were ordered out of the hospital.So when she earned her doctorate in nursing from New York University in 1964, she made the practice of limiting visits the subject of her dissertation research. Her findings that the practice was harmful drew wide attention — she was interviewed on television about it — and they ignited a transformation in medical care.“She was the one who cracked that,” said Linda H. Aiken, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, where Dr. Fagin was named dean in 1977.Dr. Fagin transformed the school — tripling its enrollment, establishing a doctoral program in nursing and building Penn into a widely acknowledged world leader in nursing research and education. In 2006, Penn renamed its Nursing Education Building the Claire M. Fagin Nursing Sciences Building.“It is really hard to identify anyone who has had a larger impact on nursing than Claire,” Dr. Aiken said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?