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Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Mary Ann Bickerdyke was a hospital adminstrator for Union soliders during the Civil War, she was also known as Mother Bickerdyke. She was the most resourceful Civil War nurse. After the war she worked in San Franisco for the Salvation Army and later became an attorney, helping union veterans with legal issues. -
Dorothea Dix
In 1841 Dorothea Dix entered East Cambridge Jail and began to teach a Sunday school class for women inmates and then discovered the conditions that the inmates were living. In 1848 Dorothea Dix sent a document to the United States Congress asking for five million acres be set aside to treat and care for the mentally ill. In 1881 the state hospital in Trenton, NJ was opened. It was the first hospital that was built and opened through her efforts. -
Carla Barton
After being of the first women to help soliders in the Civil War Clara Barton was made superintendent of Union nurses in 1864. While Carla Barton was President of the American National Red Cross. she aided victims and workers in the floods of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in 1882 and 1884. Her last act was founding the National First Aid Society in 1904. -
Linda Richards
Linda Richards was the first of five students to enroll in the first American Nurses Training Schoolin 1872. In 1874 she was named the superintendent of the Boston Training School for Nurses. She was chosen as the first President of the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools. She also created the first system for keeping individual medical records for hospitalized patients. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
In 1879 Mary Eliza Mahoney graduated as the first professional trained black nurse. In 1908 she cofounded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses which merged with the American Nurses Association in 1951. She is commemorated by the ANA with the biennial Mary Mahoney Award. -
Isabell Hampton Robb
Isabell Hampton Robb became a nurse in 1883. She was one of the founders of American nursing theory and one of the most important leaders in the history of nursing. She implented a grading policy for nursing students. In 1889 she was appointed head of the new Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. She was also a founder of the American Journal of Nursing. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
In 1891 Mary Adelaide Nutting graduated from John Hopkins School of Nursing in the first class. In 1907 she became the worlds first professor of nursing. From 1910 until she retired in 1925 she led the Department of Nursing and Health at Teachers College. -
Lavinia Dock
In 1893 with the assistance of Isabell Hampton Robb and Mary Adelaide Nutting founded the American Society of superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses. After retiring from nursing, in 1917 Dock picketed the White House in a campaign for womens suffraging, -
Lillian Wald
After dropping out of medical school, Wald organized the Henry Street Settlement also known as the Visiting Nurse Society in 1893, to help the elderly, poor and disabled. She persuaded New York Board of Education to hire a school nurse and persuaded President Teddy Roosevelt to create a Federal Childrens Bureau to protect children from abuse. -
Annie Goodrich
Annie Goodrich was the General Superintendent, Training School for Nurses, Bellevue and Allied Hospitals from 1907 to 1910. Annie Goodrich was the first Dean and Professor at the Yale University School of Nursing. Annie Goodrich was the first President of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Nursing. -
Margaret Sanger
In 1912, Margaret Sanger gave up working as a nurse to dedicate herself to distributing information on birth control. In 1916 she set up the first birth control clinic in the United States and was sent to the workhouse for creating a "public nusiance". In 1927 she helped organize the first World Population Conference in Geneva. Following the merge of several organizations and name changes the Planned Parenthood Federation came into being in 1942. -
Dorothea Orem
Dorothea Orem was a nurse theorist and developed the Orem model of Nursing between 1959 and 2001. It states that when a patient is unable to care for themselves it is the nurses resoponsibility to care for them. It is also known as Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory. -
Virginia Henderson
Virginia Henderson graduated from Army School of Nursing in 1921. Henderson is known for the 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". -
Mary Breckinridge
Mary Breckinridge was an American nurse-midwife. She founded the Kentucky Commitee for Mothers and Babies which became known as the Frontier Nursing Service in 1925. She lead the Frontier Nursing Service until her death in 1965. -
Ida V Moffett
Ida Moffett became a registered nurse in Alabama in 1926. In 1934 she became the head of Highland Avenue Baptist Hospital In 1965 was awarded the golden badge, symbol of outstanding service in field of Volunteer Red Cross Nursing. In 1968 the Birmingham Baptist Hospitals School of Nursing was changed to Ida V Moffett School of Nursing. -
Martha Rogers
Martha Rogers received her nursing degree in 1936. She established the Visiting Nurse Service of Pheonix, Arizona. She was a Professor and Head of the Division of Nursing at New York University from 1952 to 1975. In 1979 she was recognized as a Professor Emeritus. -
Lillian Holland Harvery
Lillian Harvey became a nurse in 1938. She was the director of nursing service at John A. Andrew Hospital from 1944 to 1948. She was the Dean of the school of Nursing, at the Tuskegee Institute (University) from 1948 to 1973. In 1948 the first baccalaureate program for nursing was started in Alabama under her leadership -
Hildegard Peplau
Hildegard Peplau was a nursing theorist and her work Interpersonal Relations in Nursing was published in 1952. She believed the nurse-client relationship was the foundation for nursing. In World War II Peplau was a member of the Army Nurse Corps and worked in London at a neuropsychiatric hospital. -
Jean Watson
Jean Watson obtained her BSN from the University of Colorado in 1964. She is a founder of the original Center for Human Caring in Colorado and is Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. In 1979 her theory of nursing was published, "The Philosophy and Science of Caring". -
Madeleine Leininger
Madeleine Leininger is a pioneering nursing theorist. She involovement discusses what it is to care. Her most notable contribution was her development of transculutral nursing.
