-
Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix prompted cities and states throughout the nation to create better facilities for the mentally ill. During the American Civil War, she accepted the position of Superintendent of Women Nurses. -
Linda Richards
In 1872, Richards was the first student to enroll and graduate from the nursing program. At Bellevue Hospital in New York, she created a system for charting and maintaining individual medical records for each patient, the first written reporting system for nurses. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
In 1879, Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first black woman to graduate and become a professional nurse in the United States.
Mahoney was an advocate for women's rights and co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908 to increase the amount of intercultural nurses. -
Clara Barton
Clara Barton was considered one of the greatest battlefield nurses ever. In 1881, she formed the American Red Cross. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
Robb organized the John Hopkins Training School for Nurses. She was an advocate for reducing the long hours of nursing students and improving the education in the school of nursing. -
Lavinia Dock
In 1890, Dock, while assistant superintendent at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School for Nurses, published “Materia Medica for Nurses” which quickly became a standard in Nursing curriculum. -
Anna Goodrich
Anna Goodrich was known as a crusader of nurses and served as president of the American Nurses Association from 1915 to 1918. In 1924 she developed and became dean of the first nursing program at Yale University. -
Margaret Sanger
Sanger believed in managing human reproduction to improve the human race through better breeding; therefore, in 1916 she opened the very first birth control clinic in the nation. -
Mary Breckenridge
In 1925, Mary Breckinridge started the Frontier Nursing Service in the Appalachian region of Kentucky, to provide proper health care to poor people who lived in the remote mountain settlements. She also founded the first school in America that trained and certified midwifes. Her accomplishments and efforts decreased the high infant and maternal mortality rates in pre World War II. -
Ida V. Moffett
Ida V. Moffett organized Alabama's first unit of the Cadet Nurse Corps, a federal program of the Public Health Service that was established to overcome a shortage of nurses in 1943. -
Hildegard Peplau
Peplau, “the Mother of Psychiatric Nursing,” compiled her theoretical framework for psychodynamic nursing into a manuscript entitled “Interpersonal Relations in Nursing” published in 1952. -
Virginia Henderson
Henderson is well known for her definition of nursing that states, "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 published a four-volume Nursing Studies Index, the first annotated index of nursing research. -
Martha Rogers
In 1963, Rogers edited a journal called "Nursing in Science." She also created the Science of Unitary Human Beings theory that allowed nursing to be considered one of the scientific disciplines. Her framework for nursing study and research improved nursing education, practice and research in the United States. -
Dorothea Orem
In 1971, Orem published “Nursing: Concepts of Practice,” in which she outlines her theory of nursing, the Self-care Deficit Theory of Nursing. This work and the theory it presents established Orem as a leading theorist of nursing practice and education. -
Madeleine Leininger
Madeleine Leininger is known as the "Margaret Mead of nursing." She is also the founder of Transcultural Nursing Society, a program that holds annual trans world conventions. -
Jean Watson
In 2007, Watson created the Watson Caring Science Institute, an international nonprofit organization with the mission to restore profound nature of caring and professional nurses in healthcare systems.
