The History of Nursing

By lbcasey

  • Dorothea Dix

    created the first generation of American mental asylums; The hospital, named in honor of Dorothea Dix, opened in 1856. Founded the first public mental hospital in Pennsylvania, the Harrisburg State Hospital, and later in establishing its library and reading room in 1853

  • Mary Ann Bickerdyke

    Union nurse in the American Civil War; organizer and chief of nursing, hospital, and welfare services for the western armies under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War.

  • Linda Richards

    The first professionally trained American nurse.

    Superintendent of the Boston Training School in 1874.

  • Clara Barton

    Found the America Red Cross

  • Isabel Hampton Robb

    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 new Johns Hopkins nursing school, where she continued to suggest reforms, participated in teaching, and published the text Nursing: Its Principles and Practice

  • Lavinia Dock

    she compiled the first, and long most important, manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses

  • Lillian Wald

    Lillian D. Wald was the founder of the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service and of the Henry Street Settlement. She was also responsible for the instruction of nurses in the public schools and for insurance companies providing free visiting nurses for their policy holders.

  • Mary Eliza Mahoney

    first African-American registered nurse in the U.S.A. In 1908 she was cofounder of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN).

  • Mary Adelaide Nutting

    raised the quality of higher education in nursing, hospital administration, and related fields.

  • Margaret Sanger

    founder of the American Birth Control League

  • Annie Goodrich

    She developed, and in 1924 became dean of, the first nursing program at Yale University

  • Ida V. Moffett

    first woman involved in achieving school accreditation, in forming university- level degree programs for nursing, in closing substandard nursing schools, in organizing hospital peer groups, in licensing practical nursing, and in starting junior college-level degree programs for nurses

  • Mary Breckinridge

    Mary Breckinridge was an American nurse who started the Frontier Nursing Service in the Appalachian region of Kentucky, in order to provide health care to poor people who lived in remote mountain settlements.

  • Virgina Henderson

    She wrote and/or edited several editions of the The Principles and Practice of Nursing. The International Council of Nurses presented her with the first Christianne Reimann Prize in June 1985

  • Lillian Holland Harvey

    Director of Nursing Service at John A. Andrew Hospital from 1944 to 1948, Dean of the school of Nursing, Tuskegee Institute (University) from 1948 until 1973.
    In 1948 the first baccalaureate of nursing program in the state of Alabama, was started under her leadership

  • Hildegard Peplau

    a nursing theorist whose seminal work Interpersonal Relations in Nursing was published in 1952

  • Martha Rogers

    Developed the Science of Unitary Human Beings and wrote: An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing.

  • Dorothea Orem

    founder of the Orem model of nursing, or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory

  • Jean Watson

    founder of the original Center for Human Caring in Colorado and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing

  • Madeleine Leininger

    Dr. Madeleine Leininger is the foundress of the worldwide Transcultural Nursing movement.