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Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Organizer and chief of nursing for armies under Ulysses S. Grant. Nicknamed "Mother" by soldiers. -
Dorothea Dix
an American activist on behalf of the indigent insane who, through a vigorous program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums -
Clara Barton
a pioneer American teacher, nurse, and humanitarian. She has been described as having a "strong and independent spirit" and is best remembered for organizing the American Red Cross. -
Linda Richards
the first professionally trained American nurse. She established nursing training programs in the United States and Japan, and created the first system for keeping individual medical records for hospitalized patients. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
the first black to study and work as a professionally trained nurse in the United States, graduating in 1879.
In 1908, she co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) with Adah B. Thoms -
Isabel Hampton Robb
one of the founders of modern American nursing theory and one of the most important leaders in the history of nursing. -
Lillian Wald
a nurse, social worker, public health official, teacher, author, editor, publisher, women's rights activist, and the founder of American community nursing. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
a nurse, social worker, public health official, teacher, author, editor, publisher, women's rights activist, and the founder of American community nursing. -
Lavinia Dock
nurse, author, pioneer in nursing education and social activist. Her books included a four volume history of nursing and what was for many years a standard nurse's manual of drugs. -
Margaret Sanger
an American birth control activist, an advocate of negative eugenics, and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood). -
Viriginia Henderson
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" -
Annie Goodrich
dean of the first nursing program at Yale University. She was responsible for developing the program into the Yale Graduate School of Nursing ten years later. -
Mary Breckinridge
an American nurse-midwife and the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service. -
Ida Moffett
dedicated her life to providing quality care and creating standardized nursing education. A pioneer in setting standards for healthcare, she became the 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 -
Hildegard Peplau
nursing theorist whose seminal work Interpersonal Relations in Nursing was published in 1952. -
Dorothea Orem
nursing theorist and founder of the Orem model of nursing, or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory. In simplest terms, this theory states that nurses have to supply care when the patients cannot provide care to themselves. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Dean of the Tuskegee (Institute) University School of Nursing for almost three decades -
Martha Rogers
American nurse, researcher, theorist, and author. Rogers is best known for developing the Science of Unitary Human Beings and her landmark book, An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing -
Jean Watson
well known for her Theory of Human/Transpersonal Caring. -
Madeleine Leininger
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.