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Dorothea Orem
Dorothea Elizabeth Orem was a nursing theorist and founder of the Orem model of nursing. This theory states that nurses have to supply care when the patients cannot provide care to themselves. -
Dorothea Dix
Dix became the Union's Superintendent of Female Nurses during the Civil War. A week after the attack on Fort Sumter, Dix 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. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Bickerdyke began accompanying the soldiers into battle, working in field hospitals alongside doctors who would perform quick surgeries and then move on to the next battered man. -
Clara Barton
After the Battle of Bull Run, she established an agency to obtain and distribute supplies to wounded soldiers. In July 1862, she obtained permission to travel behind the lines, eventually reaching some of the grimmest battlefields of the war and serving during the sieges of Petersburg and Richmond. In 1881 she established the American Red Cross, and served as its director until her death. -
Linda Richards
While working there, Richards created a system for keeping individual records for each patient, which was to be widely adopted both in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Aware of how little she still knew as a nurse, Linda began her quest to acquire more knowledge and then pass this on to others by establishing high quality nurse training schools. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African-American registered nurse in the U.S. In 1878, at the age of thirty-three, she was admitted as a student into the hospital's nursing program established by Dr. Marie Zakrzewska. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
In 1889, she came to the newly opened Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was the first Superintendent of Nurses and Principal of the Training School. She wrote the nursing text book, Nursing: Its Principles and Practices, published in 1893. -
Lillian Wald
Wald's work as the founder of the Henry Street Settlement and the Visiting Nurse Service demonstrated her masterful administrative talents, deep regard for humanity and skill at fundraising and publicizing. -
Lavinia Dock
Dock wrote Materia Medica for Nurses, one of the first nursing textbooks. In addition to serving as foreign editor of the American Journal of Nursing, she wrote Hygiene and Morality and in 1907. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
Nutting joined the faculty of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City and became the world's first professor of nursing. Nutting headed the Department of Nursing and Health at the college from 1910 until she retired in 1925. -
Margaret Sanger
In 1912, Sanger gave up nursing work to dedicate herself to the distribution of birth control information. -
Annie Goodrich
Known as a crusader and diplomat among nurses, Annie Warburton Goodrich was constantly active in local, state, national, and international nursing affairs. During her career, Goodrich was also president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Nursing, New York State Inspector for Training Schools, director of nursing service at Henry Street Settlement, professor of nursing at Teacher's College, Columbia University, and dean of the Army School of Nursing. -
Mary Breckinridge
Breckinridge was the first to bring nurse-midwifery to the United States and founder of the Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing. -
Ida V. Moffett
Moffett became the first woman involved in achieving school accreditation, in forming university- level degree programs for nursing, in closing substandard nursing schools, in organizing hospital peer groups, in licensing practical nursing, and in starting junior college-level degree programs for nurses. Half way through her career, the Baptist Hospital nursing school was named The Ida V. Moffett School of Nursing in recognition of her contributions to Alabama’s healthcare profession. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Dr. Lillian Harvey was Dean became the first to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing in the state of Alabama. Dr. Harvey was credited with being a crusader for unrestricted professional recognition across the state and nation. -
Martha Rogers
Rogers was appointed Head of the Division of Nursing at New York University in 1954. In about 1963 Martha edited a journal called Nursing Science. It was during that time that Rogers was beginning to formulate ideas about the publication of her third book An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing -
Madeleine Leininger
Dr. Madeleine Leininger is the foundress of the worldwide Transcultural Nursing movement. She remains as one of nursing's most prolific writers and the foremost authority throughout the world in the field of cultural care. -
Virginia Henderson
Virginia Henderson defined nursing as "assisting individuals to gain independence in relation to the performance of activities contributing to health or its recovery".
Her famous definition of nursing was one of the first statements clearly delineating nursing from medicine: -
Jean Watson
She is founder of the original Center for Human Caring in Colorado and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. The foundation of Jean Watson’s theory of nursing was published in 1979 in nursing: “The philosophy and science of caring” -
Hildegard Peplau
Hildegard E. Peplau, known as the "mother of psychiatric nursing, was the only nurse to serve the ANA as executive director and later as president. Peplau's fifty-year career in nursing left an indelible stamp on the profession of nursing, and on the lives of the mentally ill in the United States.
