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Dorothea Dix
The 19th-century woman who improved treatment of the insane in the 1850s, influencing Italy and other countries to build new hospitals and improve their treatment of the insane. Her 1845 publication Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States is considered a landmark document in the history of public health and in 1848 the first state hospital for the mentally ill was opened in Trenton, NJ. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
She served as a nurse throughout the Civil War in the West and was beloved by the enlisted men, whose rights she championed; she was also a favorite with generals Grant and Sherman. After the war she lobbied in Washington to secure pensions for Civil War nurses and veterans. -
Linda Richards
Richards completed her nursing training in 1873 becoming the first professionally trained American nurse. She established nursing training programs in the United States and Japan, and created the first system for keeping individual medical records for hospitalized patients. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
was the first black 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) with Adah B. Thoms. -
Clara Barton
Civil War nurse who founded the American Red Cross. As a nurse in American Civil War (1861-65), she earned the nickname "the angel of the battlefield" and in 1864 was named superintendent of all Union nurses. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
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. was one of the founders of modern American nursing theory -
Lavinia Dock
In 1893, Dock, with the assistance of Mary Adelaide Nutting and Isabel Hampton Robb, founded the American Society of superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses of the United States and Canada. It was a precursor to the current National League of Nursing. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
In 1907 Mary Adelaide Nutting joined the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University and became the world's first professor of nursing. Nutting led the Department of Nursing and Health at Teachers College from 1910 until her retirement in 1925 Mary Adelaide Nutting graduated from the first class of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in 1891 -
Lillian Wald
In 1913, she founded Henry Street Settlement was one of the first settlement homes founded in the United States. It provided assistance services, particularly health care services, for new immigrants and the poor. She is also credited with helping to organize the Lincoln House, one of the first settlements with an African American clientele. -
Margaret Sanger
She founded the American Birth Control League in 1921. The organization is currently known as Planned Parenthood. -
Virginia Henderson
famous for a definition of nursing: "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" Her contributions are compared to those of Florence Nightingale because of their far-reaching effects on the national and international nursing communities. She began her nursing career in 1921. -
Annie Goodrich
She developed, and in 1924 became dean of, the first nursing program at Yale University. She was responsible for developing the program into the Yale Graduate School of Nursing ten years later. -
Mary Breckinridge
She was an American nurse-midwife and the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service 1925. She also was known as Mary Carson Breckinridge. She started family care centers in the Appalachian mountains. She was known for helping many people with her hospitals. -
Ida V. Moffett
She led in implementation of 1945 legislation which led to licensure for practical nurses. She then guided development of the state's first training program for licensed practical nurses at Baptist Hospital in Gadsden, Alabama (the first class, which graduated in 1948). -
Lillian Holland Harvey
In 1948, she initiated the first baccalaureate program in the state of Alabama. The first class graduated from the baccalaureate program in 1953. For her achievements during her 1944-1973 tenure leading nursing at Tuskegee, Harvey was among the first to be inducted into the Alabama Nursing Hall of Fame in 2001. -
Hildegard Peplau
A nursing theorist who published her work Interpersonal Relations in Nursing in 1952 Peplau went on to form an interpersonal model emphasizing the need for a partnership between nurse and client as opposed to the client passively receiving treatment (and the nurse passively acting out doctor's orders). -
Dorothea Orem
A nursing theorist who founded the Orem model of nursing or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory. The idea is that patients will recover more quickly and hollistically if they are allowed to care for themselves to the best of their abilities. -
Madeleine Leininger
is a pioneering nursing theorist, 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. -
Martha Rogers
She was an American nurse, researcher, theorist, and author. Rogers is best known for developing the Science of Unitary Human Beings and her landmark book, An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing. -
Jean Watson
Known for her Theory of Human/Transpersonal Caring. The idea is that caring actions taken by nurses as they interact with others help people gain a higher degree of harmony within the mind, body, and soul as a goal of nursing practice and care.
