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Dorothea Dix
She became the Union's Superintendent of Female Nurses during the Civil War and organized the first group of military nurses which improved under her leadership. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
She was a nurse and healthcare provider to the Union Army during the Civil War and became known as "Mother Bickerdyke." -
Linda Richards
She was the first trained nurse in the U.S. and developed a system for writing accurate patient reports. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
She was the first black graduate nurse in the U.S. She was one of only four out of the original forty-two to graduate the program. -
Clara Barton
She founded the American Red Cross in May of 1881 and became known as the "Angel of the Battlefield." -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
She became the Superintendent of Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing, expanded the cirriculum, added a preclinical training period, and established an 8 hour workday for nurses. -
Lillian Wald
She opened the first public health institution at Henry Street Settlement in New York City. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
She organized and was the first president of the American Nurses Association. She also organized National League of Nursing Education, helped found the American Journal of Nursing, and was an advocate for 8 hour workdays. -
Lavinia Dock
She wrote one of the first nursing textbooks. -
Margaret Sanger
In 1914, she founded the National Birth Control League, and in 1916, she set up the first birth control clinic in the U.S. -
Annie Goodrich
She was an inspector of training schools for the New York State Department of Education. She was president of American Nurses Association from 1915-1918. She developed the first nursing program at Yale and eventually became the dean in 1924. Also, she was the originator of the plan for the Army School of Nursing in 1918. -
Ida V. Moffett
She worked at the Birmingham Baptist Hospital that is now Samford University, and Samford's nursing school is named after her. -
Hildegard Peplau
She completed her work "Interpersonal Relations in Nursing" in 1947. She served as Executive Director and President of the American Nurses Association. She was known as the "mother of psychiatric nursing." -
Lillian Holland Harvey
She became the dean in 1948 of the Tuskegee University School of Nursing, which became the first to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing in the state of Alabama. -
Virginia Henderson
She took a position at Yale University School of Nursing as research associate for a funded project that was designed to survey and assess the status of nursing research in the U.S. -
Martha Rogers
She was the dean of nursing at NYU in 1954. In 1979, she became Professor Emeritus and stayed active in the development of nursing until she died. -
Dorothea Orem
She founded the Self-Care Deficit Theory, which states nurses supply care when the patients can't supply care for themselves. -
Mary Breckinridge
She founded the Fontier Nursing Service, which provided family-centered care to rural populations and was one of the first nurse-midwifery training schools in the U.S. -
Jean Watson
She developed her Caring Theory in 1979 and also was the founder of the original Center for Human Caring in Colorado. -
Madeleine Leininger
She developed the Culture Care Diversity and Universality Theory and was the foundress of the worldwide Transculture Nursing movement.