Historical Nurses: A Timeline

  • Dorothea Dix

    Dorothea Dix
    Dorothea Dix took on the duty of being a civilian woman in the army. In doing so, she became superintendent of the union of nurses during the civil war.
  • Clara Barton

    Clara Barton
    Clara Barton was a nurse who felt America needed care for those in great need. She created the American Red Cross in 1873.
  • Linda Richards

    Linda Richards
    Linda Richards took overr the floundering Boston Training School. Her administrative experience with Sister Helen helped her turn the program around and it became one of the best nurse training programs in the country.
  • Mary Eliza Mahoney

    Mary Eliza Mahoney
    Mary Eliza Mahoney, who became the first African American to graduate from school of nursing in 1879. She is also in the national assosciation of graduate nurses who recognized her intergration in the nursing field.
  • Hampton Robb

    Hampton Robb
    Hampton Robb started the American Nurses Alumane. The American Nurses Alumane was changed to the American Nurses Association in 1896 .
  • Lavinia Dock

    Lavinia Dock
    In 1893, Dock, with the assistance of Mary Adelaide Nutting and Isabel Hampton Robb, founded the American Society of superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses of the United States and Canada, a precursor to the current National League for Nursing.
  • Anne Goodrich

    Anne Goodrich
    Anne Goodrich became chief inspecting nurse for the United States Army. She also is credited with coming up with the plan for the Army School of Nursing.
  • Margaret Sanger

    Margaret Sanger created the American Birth Control League. It is known as planned parenthood of america today.
  • Mary Breckinridge

    Mary Breckinridge
    Mary Breckinridge was the nation's foremost pioneer in the development of American midwifery and the provision of care to the nation's rural areas as founder of the Frontier Nursing Service.
  • Virginia Henderson

    Virginia Henderson
    Virginia Henderson defined nursing as "assisting individuals to gain independence in relation to the performance of activities contributing to health or its recovery"
  • Madeleine Leininger

    Madeleine Leininger
    Dr. Madeleine Leininger is the foundress of the worldwide Transcultural Nursing movement. She remains as one of nursing's most prolific writers and the foremost authority throughout the world in the field of cultural care
  • Hildegard Peplau

    Hildegard Peplau
    Hildegard Peplau the mother of psychiatric nursing – she is the only nurse to serve on the ANA as exceutive and later president
  • Dorothea Orem

    Dorothea Orem
    Dorothea Orem developed the orem model of nursing. This theory states that nurses must provide care to those who cannot help themselves as they would for themselves
  • Ida V. Moffett

    Ida V. Moffett
    Ida V. Moffett --- former president of the State Board of Nursing, she developed the first licensed practical nursing program in Alabama and also began the state's first two-year nursing program at Jefferson State Community College.
  • Martha Rogers

    Martha Rogers
    Rogers is best known for developing the Science of Unitary Human Beings but her also her landmark book, An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing.
  • Jean Watson

    Jean Watson
    Dr. Watson, Founder, created her international nonprofit Watson Caring Science Institute in 2007. She created it with the mission to restore the profound nature of caring-healing.