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Dorthea Dix
Dorthea Dix was an American activist on behalf of the indigent insane who, through a vigorous program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums. During the Civil War, she served as Superintendent of Army Nurses. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
She is also known as Mother Bickerdyke, was a hospital administrator for Union soldiers during the American Civil War.
She was born in Knox County, Ohio, to Hiram Ball and Annie Rodgers Ball. She later moved to Galesburg, Illinois. -
Linda Richards
Linda Richards was born on July 27, 1841, the youngest daughter of Sanford Richards, an itinerant preacher, and his wife, Betsy Sinclair Richards. After a year of training, Linda Richards, the first student to enroll, was the first to graduate from the nursing program. In 1870, she became the first trained nurse in America. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African-American registered nurse in the U.S.A. She was born free on May 7, 1845 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, U.S.A. and became interested in nursing when she was a teenager. In 1878, at the age of thirty-three, she was admitted as a student into the hospital's nursing program. -
Clara Barton
Clara Barton was a pioneer American teacher, nurse, and humanitarian. She has been described as having a "strong and independent spirit" and is best remembered for organizing the American Red Cross in 1881 -
Isabel Hampton Robb
Isabel Robb was one of the founders of modern American nursing theory and one of the most important leaders in the history of nursing. In 1889, she was appointed head of the Johns Hopkins Nursing School. -
Lillian Wald
In 1893, after a trying time at an orphanage where children were maltreated, she started to teach a home class on nursing for Lower East Side (New York) women. Not long thereafter, she began to care for sick residents of the Lower East Side, and soon decided to devote her life to this cause. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
American nurse and educator, remembered for her influential role in raising the quality of higher education in nursing, hospital administration, and related fields. She helped found the American Journal of Nursing in 1900. -
Lavinia Dock
She graduated from Bellevue Training School for Nurses in 1886 and soon after became night supervisor at Bellevue. In addition to serving as foreign editor of the American Journal of Nursing, she wrote Hygiene and Morality and in 1907, co-authored with Adelaide Nutting the first two volumes of the four-volume History of Nursing. -
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger was educated as and worked as a nurse. In her work with poor women on the Lower East Side of New York, she was aware of the effects of unplanned and unwelcome pregnancies. In 1916 (1917 according to some sources), Sanger set up the first birth control clinic in the United States. -
Virgina Henderson
Henderson is famous for a definition of nursing: "The unique function of the nurse is to assist the individual, sick or well, in the performance of those activities contributing to health or its recovery (or to peaceful death) that he would perform unaided if he had the necessary strength, will or knowledge" [1]. She graduated from the Army School of Nursing, Washington, D.C. in 1921. -
Annie Goodrich
Known as a crusader and diplomat among nurses, Annie Warburton Goodrich was constantly active in local, state, national, and international nursing affairs. She was, in 1924, dean of the first Nursing program at Yale University. -
Hildegard Peplau
During World War II, Hildegard Peplau was a member of the Army Nurse Corps and worked in a neuropsychiatric hospital in London, England. She also did work at Bellevue and Chestnut Lodge Psychiatric Facilities and was in contact with renowned psychiatrists Freida Fromm-Riechman and Harry Stack Sullivan. -
Mary Breckinridge
She joined the American Committee for Devastated France following the end of World War I. While in Europe she became acquainted with the nurse-midwives in France and Great Britain and thought with their training, she could perhaps meet the problem of medical care for mothers and babies in rural America. It was during this time Mrs. Breckinridge recognized a call upon her life. She relayed to her mother that she was sure this was what she was meant to do. -
Ida V. Moffett
She advocated constant contact with patients through gentle words and a comforting physical touch. Moffett was also the driving force behind numerous successful efforts to bring professionalism and advanced academic training to the field of nursing. In 1943 she organized Alabama's first unit of the Cadet Nurse Corps, a federal program of the Public Health Service that was established to overcome a shortage of nurses, and oversaw construction of a second building for the School of Nursing. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Dr. Lillian Harvey was Dean of the Tuskegee (Institute) University School of Nursing for almost three decades. Under her leadership and untiring efforts, the School of Nursing at Tuskegee became the first to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing in the state of Alabama. -
Dorothea Orem
Dorothea Orem was born in Baltimore, Maryland, was a nursing theorist and founder of the Orem model of nursing, or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory. -
Madeleine Leininger
Madeleine Leininger is a pioneering nursing theorist, first published in 1961[1]. Her contributions to nursing theory involve the discussion of what it is to care. Most notably, she developed the concept of transcultural nursing, bringing the role of cultural factors in nursing practice into the discussion of how to best attend to those in need of nursing care. -
Martha Rogers
was an American nurse, researcher, theorist, and author. Rogers is best known for developing the Science of Unitary Human Beings and her landmark book, An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing in 1970. -
Jean Watson
Dr. Jean Watson is Distinguished Professor of Nursing and holds an endowed Chair in Caring Science at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. The foundation of Jean Watson’s theory of nursing was published in 1979 in nursing: “The philosophy and science of caring”.
