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Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix worked for health and welfare of the mentally ill. Her efforts led to the first American insane asylums. In 1856, she founded the first public mental hospital in Pennsylvania the Harrisburg State Hospital. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
In 1861 during the American Civil War ,Mary Ann Bickerdyke fought to establish 300 hospitals and gave care to wounded on 19 battlefields. -
Linda Richards
Around 1871, Linda Richards became the first professionally trained American Nurse. She is also recognized as being the first to promote and create a system for keeping individual medical records for hospitalized patients. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
In 1879 Mary Eliza Mahoney became the first African American registered Nurse in the United States. In 1896, she became on one of the original members of what would later be the American Nurses Association. -
Clara Barton
Clara Barton helped form the American Red Cross. -
Lillian Wald
Lillian Wald was a pioneer in Public Health Nursing which she coined the term for in 1893. Her efforts led to school nurses in 1902 and a regular system of school lunch in 1908. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
Isabel Hampton Robb was the first to organize and support nursing licensure in the United States. In 1896 she served as the first president of the American Nurse Asssociation. -
Lavinia Lloyd Dock
Lavinia Lloyd Dock compiled the first manual of drugs for nursing. In 1896 wrote one of the first Nursing textbooks "Materia Medica for Nurses". -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
In 1900, Mary Adelaide Nutting helped found the American Journal of Nursing. She also worked to establish scholarships for Nursing Students. In 1907 she became the world's first professor of nursing. -
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger was a pioneer nurse in family planning. She opened the first famiily planning and Birth control clinic in the Bronx, New York in 1916 which was thought to be illegal and was raided by Police 9 days later. The first legal family planning and birth control clinic was then opened in 1923. She also founded the American Birth Control League in 1921. -
Annie Goodrich
Annie Goodrich originated and became the first dean of Army School of Nursing. She also developed and was first dean of the First Nursing Program at Yale University in 1929. She also served as president of American Nurses Association from 1915-1918. -
Virginia Henderson
Virginia Henderson graduated from the Army School of Nursing in 1921. her definition of nursing has become famous. It was the first statements clearly distinguishing nursing from medicine. She was one of the first nurses to point out that nursing dows not consist of merely following physicians orders. -
Mary Breckinridge
Mary Breckinridge pioneered the nurse-midwife profession by establishing the Frontier Nursing Service in 1925. She focused on meeting the healthcare needs of rural America's mothers and babies. -
Ida V Moffett
In 1943, she organized a federal program of the Public Health service in Alabama that was called Cadet Nurse Corps to help with the shortage of nurses. She constantly advocated nursing professionalism and advanced academic training. In 1945 her efforts led to licensure for practice nurses. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Due to her efforts the School of Nursing at Tuskegee University became the first to offer a Bachelor of Science Degree in Nursing in the State of Alabama in 1948. -
Hildegard Peplau
Hildegard Paplau is known as the "mother of psychiatric nursing". She developed and advanced the theory and practice of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing. She stressed the "nurse-patient relationship" in actual nursing. -
Dorothea Orem
Dorothea Orem published "Guides for Developing Curricula for the Education of Practical Nurses"in 1959. She constructed the Orem model of nursing (also called "Self care Deficit Nursing Theory") based on the belief that individuals have and should utilize the capacity to care for themselved and/or their dependents. -
Martha Rogers
Martha Rogers developed the Science of Unitary Human Beings which was a theory that promoted nursing as one of the scientific disciplines in 1970. That same year she published "An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing". -
Madeline Leininger
Medaline Leininger expressed the need for nurses to understand their patients. She was a pioneer nurse anthropologist that founded Transcultural Nursing in 1974. -
Jean Watson
Jean Watson developed the Theory of Human Caring (or the Caring Model) in 1979.
