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Dorothea Dix
Shortly following the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, 59-year-old Dorothea Dix offered her services to the Union Army and was appointed the Superintendent of Female Nurses. Dix had to convince several military superiors that women could nurse soldiers effectively, so she began a recruictment program. She enlisted older, plain looking women and insisted on an equally plain dress code. Even with these strict orders, some 3,000 women served under her. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Mary Ann Bickerdyke, also known as Mother Bickerdyke, was a hospital administrator for Union soldiers during the American Civil War. During the war, she became chief of nursing under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant, and served at the Battle of Vicksburg. Mother Bickerdyke became the best known, most colorful, and probably most resourceful Civil War nurse.Mother Bickerdyke had built 300 hospitals and aided the wounded on 19 battlefields. -
Linda Richards
In 1873, Linda noticed an advertisement for a nurse-training program to be offered at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. After a year of training, she was the first to graduate from the nursing program. By 1874 Linda was ready to take over the floundering Boston Training School.
Linda Richards continued to establish nurse training programs and schools in Philadelphia, Massachusetts and Michigan. -
Clara Barton
Clara barton began her work during the Civil War. She established an agency to obtain and distibute supplies to wounded soldiers, both north and south. In 1881she established the American Red Cross and served as its director until her death. -
Lavinia Dock
After serving as a visiting nurse among the poor, she compiled the first, and most important 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. She played a major role as a contributing editor to the American Journal of Nursing. She also did most of the work for A History of Nursing. -
Lillian Wald
Lillian Wald was an American social worker and pioneer in public health nursing. In 1893 she organized a visiting nurse service, which became the center of the noted Henry Street Settlement in New York City. The United States Children's Bureau was suggested by her along with many other public health services. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
Isabel Hampton Robb was one of the founders of the modern American nursing theory and one of the most important leaders in the history of nursing. In 1896 Isabel Robb became the first president of the Nurses' Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada, which later would become the American Nurses Association. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
Mary Adelaide Nutting was an American educator, administrator, and author in the field of nursing. In 1889 she entered the first class of the new Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1894 she became superintendent of nurses and principal of the school. In 1899 an experimental program in hospital economics was established at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City. She also helped found the American Journal of Nursing in 1900. -
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. In 1908 she was cofounder of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). Mahoney gave the welcoming address at the first convention of the NACGN and served as the association's national chaplain. -
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger was educated as and worked as a nurse. In her work with poor women on the Lower East Side of New York, she was aware of the effects of unplanned and unwelcome pregnancies. In 1912, Sanger gave up nursing work to dedicate herself to the distribution of birth control information. In 1916, Sanger set up the first birth control clinic in the United States, and the following year, she was sent to the workhouse for "creating a public nuisance." -
Annie Goodrich
Annie Goodrich obtained her nursing education at New York Hospital and received her R.N. in 1892. She was superintendent of nursing at several hospitals and training schools. She convinced the military to use trained nurses overseas, rather than volunteers. In 1918 the Army School of Nursing was established, and Annie Goodrich was the dean. -
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. FNS, which has served as a model of rural health care delivery for the United States and the rest of the world, included a decentralized system of nurse-midwives visiting clients at their homes, district nursing centers, and a hospital serving an area of 700 square miles. -
Ida V. Moffett
In 1943 she organized Alabama's first unit of the Cadet Nurse Corps. She was also the first woman involved in achieving school accreditation, forming university level degree programs for nursing, closing substandard nursing schools, organizing hospital peer groups, licensing practical nursing, and in starting junior college level degree programs for nurses. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Dr. Lillian Holland Harvey was born in Holland, Virginia. She is a graduate of the Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing (N.Y.), class of 1938. Harvey was the director of Nursing Service at John A. Andrew Hospital from 1944 to 1948, and also the Dean of the school of Nursing at Tuskegee Institute from 1948 until 1973. In 1948 the first baccalaureate of nursing program in the state of Alabama, was started under her leadership. -
Hildegard Peplau
Hildegard Peplau emphasized the nurse-client relationship as the foundation of nursing practice. She did this by her six nursing roles for clinical nursing. She also developed Peplau's developmental stages of the nurse-client relationship. -
Dorothea Orem
Dorothea Orem was a nursing theorist and founded the Orem model of Nursing, also known as the Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory. This theory states that nurses have to supply care when the patients cannot provide care to themselves. She published her theory in 1959 in "Guides for Developing Curricula for the Education of Practical Nurses." -
Virginia Henderson
Virginia Avenel Henderson was an American nurse, researcher, theorist and author. Henderson defined nursing as doing things for patients that they would do for themselves if they could, that is if they were physically able or had the required knowledge. The booklet that Virginia Henderson wrote outlining her definition of nursing, called "Basic Principles of Nursing Care," was published in 1960 and has since been translated into more than 20 languages. -
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. She is a pioneering nursing theorist, first published in 1961. Her contributions to nursing theory involve the discussion of what it is to care. -
Martha Rogers
Martha Rogers 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. In 1963, she edited a journal called Nursing Science. In 1964 she published Reveille in Nursing. She published her model of human interaction and the nursing process in 1970 when she published An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing. -
Jean Watson
Jean Watson’s Theory of Transpersonal Caring also called Theory of Human Caring or The Caring Model was developed in 1979. This theory emphasizes the humanistic aspects of nursing in combination with scientific knowledge. Watson also defined nursing by ten factors that focus on the spiritual subjective aspects of a patient/nurse and the "caring moment" relating to the time when the nurse and patient first come together.
