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Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix created the first generation of American mental asylums. She spent more than 20 years working for improved treatment of mentally ill patients and for better prison conditions. During the Civil War, she served as Superintendent of Army Nurses. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Mary Ann Bickerdyke led a drive to gather medical supplies for the soldiers in the Civil War. When she delivered the supplies, she refused to leave the camp because of the poor conditions. Nicknamed "Mother" Bickerdyke by the soldiers she cared for. -
Linda Richards
Linda Richards was the first woman to enroll in and graduate from a nursing program at the New England Hospital for Women and Children, becoming the first professionally trained American nurse. She also established the first system for keep individual medical records for hospitalized patients. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African-American registered nurse in the United States. In 1908 she was cofounder of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). -
Clara Barton
Known as "The Angel of the Battlefield". She was a Civil War nurse who established an agency to obtain and distribute supplies to wounded soldiers. She also founded the American Red Cross. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
In 1889, she was appointed head of the new Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. She served as president of both the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses (which eventually became the National League for Nursing), and the Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada, (which became the American Nurses Association). -
Lavinia Dock
As both student and supervisor at Bellevue, Lavinia Dock became aware of the problems students faced in studying drugs and solutions. As a result, she wrote Materia Medica for Nurses, one of the first nursing textbooks. She also worked with Lillian Wald at Henry Street Settlement and with Isabel Hampton Robb at Johns Hopkins School for Nursing. Shealso aided in founding the American Society of superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses of the United States and Canada. -
Lillian Wald
In 1893, Lillian Wald founded the Henry Street Settlement and began teaching health and hygiene to immigrant women on the impoverished Lower East Side. Wald provided leadership to the Settlement until 1930. During that time, Wald was a national leader of social reform and a crusader for human rights. In 1909, she became one of the original founders of the NAACP. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
In 1894, Mary Adelaide Nutting became principal of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. After leaving, she accepted the chairmanship of the newly developing Department of Nursing Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and became the first nurse ever to be appointed to a university professorship. She helped establish new standards of conduct for training nurses and for hospital treatment of nurses. -
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger's personal experience and work as a public-health nurse convinced her that family planning, especially where poverty was a factor, was a necessary. She was the founder of what became known as Planned Parenthood. She actively supported the newly available birth control pill in the 60s. -
Annie Goodrich
Annie Goodrich founded the Yale School of Nursing and in 1924 became the Dean. In her earlier career, she was the superintendent of nurses at New York Post-Graduate Hospital and the New York Hospital. -
Mary Breckinridge
Mary Breckinridge established the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) in 1925 to provide professional health care in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky, one of America's poorest and most isolated regions. In her 40 years of work with the Frontier Nursing Service, well over 50,000 registered patients were treated. -
Ida V. Moffett
In 1941, Ida V, Moffett became director of nursing for both Birmingham Baptist and Highland Avenue Baptist hospitals and their joint nursing school. 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. She believed that "nothing takes the place of the personal touch." -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Lillian Holland Harvey was the Dean of the Tuskegee Institute University School of Nursing for nearly 30 years. Under her leadership, the institute became the first to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing in the state of Alabama. In 1957, the Nursing School received full accreditation for its baccalaureate degree program from the National League for Nursing. -
Hildegard Peplau
Dr. Peplau emphasized the nurse-client relationship as the foundation of nursing practice. At the time, her research and emphasis on the give-and-take of nurse-client relationships was seen by many as revolutionary. Peplau went on to form an interpersonal model emphasizing the need for a partnership between nurse and client as opposed to the client passively receiving treatment (and the nurse passively acting out doctor's orders). Her Interpersonal relations model book was published in 1952. -
Martha Rogers
Martha Rogers was an American nurse, researcher, theorist, and author. She was appointed Head of the Division of Nursing at New York University in 1954. Rogers is well known for developing the Science of Unitary Human Beings and her book, An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing. Rogers officially retired as Professor and Head of the Division of Nursing in 1975 after 21 years of service. -
Dorothea Orem
Dorothea Orem was a nursing theorist and founder of the Orem model of nursing, or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory. The theory states that nurses have to supply care when the patients cannot provide care to themselves. -
Madeleine Leininger
Madeleine Leininger's 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. -
Virginia Henderson
She is famous for her 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 necessary strength, will, or knowledge." She holds 12 honorary doctoral degrees and has received the International Council of Nursing's Christianne Reimann Prize, which is considered nursing's most prestigious award. -
Jean Watson
Jean Watson developed the Theory of Human Caring. She is founder of the original Center for Human Caring in Colorado and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She previously served as Dean of Nursing at the University Health Sciences Center and is a Past President of the National League for Nursing.
