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Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix played a major role in the founding of the first public mental hospital in Pennsylvania, the Harrisburg State Hospital, and later in establishing its library and reading room in 1853 -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Mary Ann Bickerdyke was a hospital administrator for Union soldiers during the American Civil War. Mother Bickerdyke became the best known, most colorful, and probably most resourceful Civil War nurse. -
Linda Richards
Linda Richards was America’s first trained nurse. In 1874, Linda was ready to take over the floundering Boston Training School. Her administrative experience with Sister Helen helped her turn the program around and it became one of the best nurse training programs in the country. -
Clara Barton
Clara Barton became President of the American branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which was founded, by her, on May 21, 1881 in Dansville, N.Y -
Isabel Hampton Robb
Isabel Hampton Robb was one of the founders of modern American nursing theory and one of the most important leaders in the history of nursing. In 1889 she was appointed head of the new Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, where she continued to suggest reforms, participated in teaching, and published the text Nursing: Its Principles and Practice. -
Lavinia Dock
Lavinia Dock compiled the first manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses in 1890. She strove not only to improve the health of the poor but also to improve the profession of nursing through her teaching, lecturing, and writing. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
From 1891-1894 Nutting was head nurse at John Hopkins hospital for two years and then assistant superintendent of nurses for a year. -
Lillian Wald
In 1893, after a trying time at an orphanage where children were maltreated, she started to teach a home class on nursing for Lower East Side women. Not long thereafter, she began to care for sick residents of the Lower East Side, and soon decided to devote her life to this cause. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African-American registered nurse in the U.S.A. In 1896, Mahoney became one of the original members of a predominately white Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada. -
Margaret Sanger
In 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic at 46 Amboy St. in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the United States. -
Annie Goodrich
She developed, and in 1924 became dean of, the first nursing program at Yale University. -
Mary Breckinridge
Mary Breckinridge established the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) in 1925 to provide professional health care in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky, one of America's poorest and most isolated regions. -
Ida V. Moffett
In 1943 she 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, and oversaw construction of a second building for the School of Nursing. The school of nursing at Samford University is named in honor of her. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
In 1948 the first baccalaureate of nursing program in the state of Alabama, was started under her leadership. -
Hildegard Peplau
Hildegard Peplau is considered the "mother of psychiatric nursing," was a true pioneer in the development of the theory and practice of psychiatric and mental health nursing. Peplau was a nursing theorist whose seminal work Interpersonal Relations in Nursing was published in 1952. -
Martha Rogers
Between 1952 and 1975 she was a Professor and Head of the Division of Nursing at New York University, after which she was recognized as a Professor Emeritus in 1979. -
Virginia Henderson
In 1953, Henderson accepted a position at Yale University School of Nursing as research associate for a funded project designed to survey and assess the status of nursing research in the United States. Following completion of the survey, Henderson was funded to direct the Nursing Studies Index Project. The outcome of this project was publication of the four-volume Nursing Studies Index, the first annotated index of nursing research. -
Madeleine Leininger
She is considered by some to be the "Margaret Mead of nursing" and is recognized worldwide as the founder of transcultural nursing, a program that she created in 1974. -
Jean Watson
Jean Watson developed the Caring Theory in 1979. -
Dorothea Orem
Dorothea Orem was the founder of the Orem Model of Nursing.She completed the 6th edition of Nursing:Concepts of Practice, published by Mosby in January 2001.
