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Dorothea Dix
Dix was a teacher and social reformer for the treatment of the mentally ill. In 1854, she received pass from the Senate and House of Representatives to open a place to benefit the deaf, blind, mute, and insane. This was known as the first mental asylum. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Bickerdyke was a nurse during the Civil War. In 1861, she began to care for the Union soldiers and opened a hospital for them. -
Linda Richards
Richards is known as the first professionally trained American nurse. She established the first system for keeping individual records for hospitalized patients. -
Clara Barton
Barton was a nurse during the Civil War, and in 1862 she received permission to travel behind the lines. She is known for her founding of the American Red Cross in 1881. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
Robb was one of the founders of the Modern American Nursing Theory. She also wrote two early nursing textbooks in 1889 and 1894. -
Lavinia Dock
Dock was the first person to compile a manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses. She went on to join the Nurses' Settlement in New York City. -
Lillian Wald
Wald was the founder of the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service and of the Henry Street Settlement. She believed everyone, regardless of race, gander, or ethnicity, should receive care in America. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
Nutting was the head nurse at John Hopkins Hospital training school for nurses. She then joined the faculty of Teachers' Colleague at Columbia University in New York City and became the world's first professor of nursing. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mahoney is known as the first African-American registered nurse in the United States. She co-founded the National Associtation of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). -
Margaret Sanger
In 1912, Sanger dedicated herself to the distribution of birth control information. In 1914, she founded the National Birth Control League. -
Annie Goodrich
Goodrich was the first dean and professor of the nursing program at Yale University. She held this position from 1925-1934. -
Mary Breckinridge
Breckinridge was the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service. This establishment increased the amount of healthy births, and decreased the number of maternal deaths during birth. -
Ida V. Moffett
In 1943, Moffett organized Alabama's first unit of the Cadet Nurse Corps. In 1945, she guided the development of the state's first training program for licensed practical nurses at Baptist Hospital in Gasden, AL. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Harvey was the director of Nursing Service at John A. Andrew Hospital from 1944-1948. In 1948, sheinitiated the first baccalaureate degree nursing program in the state of Alabama at the Tuskegee Institute. -
Hildegard Peplau
Peplau published the Interpersonal Relations Model. She was also a member of the Army Nurse Corps during WWII. -
Virginia Henderson
Henderson is famous for her definition of nursing, which is: "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 a peaceful death) that he would perform unaided if he had the neccessary strength, wish, or knowledge." -
Martha Rogers
Rogers believed in the concept of Science of Unitary Human Beings. In 1970, she published "An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing, " which opened up a new era of nursing science. -
Madeleine Leininger
Leiniinger was dean at the University of Washington, School of Nursing. There, she founded transcultural nursing, which is a blend of nursing care and cultural knowledge. -
Jean Watson
Watson is a theorist of the caring theme. She has authored and co-authored over twelve books to date, focused on caring. -
Dorothea Orem
Orem is a nursing theorist and founder of the Open Model of Nursing known as Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory. This states that nurses have to supply care when the patients cannot provide care for themselves.
