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Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix was an advocate for the mentally ill. She created the first generation of American mental asylums. During the Civil War, she served as Superintendent of Army Nurses. Dix was not a formly trained nurse, but still she made a big impact on nursing history. -
Lillian Wald
Lillian Wald was a nurse, social worker, women's rights activist, and the founder of American community nursing. She was the founder of Henry Street Settlement. -
Linda Richards
Linda Richards is known as America's first trained nurse.Richards's training as a nurse began under the supervision of Doc Currier, family doctor. She spent four years nursing her husband after being wounded in the Civil War. Richards worked at Boston College Hospital where she established a nurse training school. -
Clara Barton
Clara Barton is a pioneer nurse best known for organizing the American Red Cross. Barton played a huge role in the American Civil War. Lincoln put her in charge of searching for missing men in the Union Army. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mary Mahoney was the first African-American nurse. Unlike many blacks of her day, Mary Mahoney decided not to go into domestic work, but enrolled in nursing school. In 1879, out of a class of 40 students, only she, at age 34, and two other white students, graduated. Now black students were accepted to the school as long as they met the requirements -
Lavinia Dock
Lavinia Dock graduated from Bellevue Training School for Nurses in 1886. She wrote one of the first nursing textbooks. In addition to serving as 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. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
Isabel Hampton Robb is one of the founders of modern American nursing theory. One of her most notable contributions to the system of nursing education was the implementation of a grading policy for nursing students. She was later appointed head of John Hopkins nursing school. She also was the first president of the ANA. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
Mary Adelaide Nutting was one of the first graduates of the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing. She later became superintendent in 1894. She expanded the curriculum in the school of nursing, added a preclinical training period, and established an eight-hour day for nurses -
Mary Breckinridge
Mary Breckinridge is regarded as the first to bring nurse-midwifery to the United States and founder of the Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing. She established the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) in 1925 to provide professional health care in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. She wanted to improve the health of women and children after the death of her two young children. -
Dorothea Orem
Dorothea Orem was a nursing theorist and founder of the Orem model of nursing, or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory. This theory stated that nurses have to supply care when the patients cannot provide care to themselves. -
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger pushed the issue of birth control. She is the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood). Sanger gradually won some support, both in the public as well as in the courts, for a woman's choice to decide how and when, if ever, she will bear children. She opened up the first famiy lanning and birth control clinic in Brownsville. -
Annie Goodrich
Annie Goodrich was the first female Dean at Yale University. She received a doctorate in science. During her career, Goodrich was also president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Nursing, New York State Inspector for Training Schools, director of nursing service at Henry Street Settlement, professor of nursing at Teacher's College, Columbia University, and dean of the Army School of Nursing. -
Ida V. Moffett
Ida V. Moffett was one of the most beloved and influential Alabamians in the health profession. Moffett dedicated her life to providing quality care and creating standardized nursing education. She became the first woman involved in achieving school accreditation, in forming university- level degree programs for nursing. -
Hildegard Peplau
Hildegard Peplau was a nursing theorist who emphasized the nurse-client relationship as the foundation of nursing practice. She was also known as the "mother of psychiatric nursing". Peplau's seminal book, Interpersonal Relations in Nursing, was completed in 1948, but not published for four years because it was then considered too revolutionary for a nurse to publish a book without a physician co-author. -
Virginia Henderson
Virginia 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". She is known as the "mother of mondern nursing". -
Martha Rogers
Martha Rogers is best known for developing the Science of Unitary Human Beings and her landmark book, An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing. She served twenty-one years as Head of the Division of Nurse Education. -
Jean Watson
Jean Watson is distinguished professor of nursing and holds a chair in Caring Science at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. She is founder of the original Center for Human Caring in Colorado and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. Her research has been in the area of human caring and loss. -
MAdeleine Leininger
Madeleine Leininger is the foundress of the worldwide Transcultural Nursing movement, bringing the role of cultural factors in nursing practice. She was also a nursing theorist, with the idea of what it is to care.
