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Linda Richards
Linda's experience with nursing her dying mother awakened Richards' interest in nursing. Though in 1856, at the age of fifteen, Richards entered St. Johnsbury Academy for a year in order to become a teacher, and indeed taught for several years, she was never truly happy in that profession. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mahonney was the first African American 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). -
Lavinia Dock
Dock was a nurse, feminist, 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. She participated in protest movements for women's rights that resulted in the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
She was active in the International Council of Nurses and the Committee to Secure by Act of Congress the Employment of Graduate Women Nurses in the Hospital Service of the US Army, which worked toward the establishment of the Army Nurse Corps. In 1896, Isabel Hampton Robb became the first President of the Nurses' Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada, which would later become the American Nurses Association. -
Dorthea Orem
A noted social reformer, Dix became the Union's Superintendent of Female Nurses during the Civil War. A week after the attack on Fort Sumter, Dix, at age 59, volunteered her services to the Union and received the appointment in June 1861 placing her in charge of all women nurses working in army hospitals. -
Margaret Sanger
Sanger was an American birth control activist, sex educator, and nurse. Sanger coined the term birth control, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established Planned Parenthood. -
Mary Breckenridge
Mary Breckinridge was an American nurse-midwife and the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service. She also was known as Mary Carson Breckinridge. She started family care centers in the Appalachian mountains. -
Clara Barton
Clarissa "Clara" Barton is best known as the founder of the American Red Cross. She began her lifetime of helping others at the beginning of the Civil War, when she organized medical care for Union troops wounded in the Baltimore Riots of 1861. -
Virginia Henderson
Virginia Henderson was a nurse, researcher, theorist and author. She graduated from the Army School of Nursing, Washington, D.C. in 1921. -
Ida V. Moffett
In 1923, she graduated from Alliance High School; and, encouraged by public health nurses in her rural community of Jefferson County, she enrolled in the Birmingham Baptist Hospital School of Nursing. As part of her training, Ida immediately began work as a bedside nurse. -
Hildegard Peplau
Peplau was the first published nursing theorist since Florence Nightingale and created the middle-range nursing theory of interpersonal relations, which helped to revolutionize the scholarly work of nurses. As a primary contributor to mental health law reform, she led the way towards humane treatment of patients with behavior and personality disorders. -
Martha Rogers
Rogers was an American nurse, researcher, theorist, and author. Rogers is best known for developing the Science of Unitary Human Beings and for her landmark book, An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing. -
Anna Goodrich
Annna Goodrich became chief inspecting nurse of the United States Army's hospitals. She was the founder of the Yale School of Nursing and its first dean in 1923. -
Madeleine Leininger
Madeleine Leininger is a pioneering nursing theorist and nursing professor. First published in 1961, her contributions to nursing theory involve the discussion of what it is to care. Most notably, 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. -
Jean Watson
She served as Dean of Nursing at the University Health Sciences Center and was the President of the National League for Nursing. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. Her books include The Philosophy and Science of Caring, which was published in 2008.
