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Dorothea Dix
Dorothea was an American activist on behalf of the indigent insane who, through a vigorous program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums. During the Civil War, she served as Superintendent of Army Nurses. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
She was also known as Mother Bickerdyke, and was a hospital administrator for Union soldiers during the American Civil War. By the end of the war, with the help of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Mother Bickerdyke had built 300 hospitals and aided the wounded on 19 battlefields . After the war ended, she worked for the Salvation Army in San Francisco, and became an attorney, helping Union veterans with legal issues. -
Clara Barton
In April 1862, after the First Battle of Bull Run, she established an agency to obtain and distribute supplies to wounded soldiers. In 1865, President Lincoln placed Barton in charge of the search for the missing men of the Union Army. Barton became President of the American branch of the ICRC (international Committee of the Red Cross), which was founded on May 21, 1881 -
Linda Richards
Linda Richards was 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
Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African-American 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. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
One of her most notable contributions to the system of nursing education was the implementation of a grading policy for nursing students. 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. -
Liliian Wald
was a nurse, social worker, public health official, teacher, author, editor, publisher, women's rights activist, and the founder of American community nursing. In 1893 after working in a orphanage she started to teach a home class on nursing for Lower East Side (New York) 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. -
Lavinia Dock
As both student and supervisor, Lavinia Dock became aware of the problems students faced in studying drugs and solutions. As a result she 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
In 1889, she went to Baltimore to enter the first class of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School for Nurses. After graduating in 1891, she served as a head nurse at the school and in 1894 she became the school's principal. In 1907, she joined the faculty of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City and became the world's first professor of nursing.She was a strong advocate of university education for nurses and was instrumental in developing the first programs of this type -
Margaret Sanger
was an American birth control activist and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood). She was among the early influential contributors to Relationship counseling in the U.S. -
Annie Goodrich
She established the United States Student Nurse Reserve, commonly known as the Army School of Nursing. In 1923, she became the first female Dean and professor at Yale University School of Nursing. -
Virginia Henderson
Virginia Henderson is 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" Shewas an early advocate for the inclusion of psychiatric nursing in the curriculum and served on a committee to develop such a course at Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, Vir -
Mary Breckinridge
Mary Breckinridge was an American nurse-midwife and the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service. She started family care centers in the Appalachian mountains. Since no midwifery course was offered in the United States Breckinridge returned to England to receive the training she needed at the British Hospital for Mothers and Babies. She returned to the United States in 1925 and on May 28 of that year founded the Kentucky Committee for Mothers and Babies -
Martha Rogers
Rogers is best known for developing the Science of Unitary Human Beings and her landmark book, An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing. 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 (Rogers, 1970). -
Hildegard Peplau
In 1942 Peplau enlisted in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps and was assigned to a psychiatric hospital in England, where she pioneered innovative approaches to treating emotionally scarred and battle-fatigued soldiers.The notes she took back with her provided the foundation of what would later become her seminal work, "Interpersonal Relations in Nursing," published in 1952. -
Ida V. Moffett
She organized Alabama's first Cadet Nurse Corps unit in 1943 and oversaw expansion of the nursing school facilities at the hospital. Through her implementation efforts the development of licensed practical nurses took hold statewide. In 1961 Moffett was appointed to the United States Surgeon General's Consulting Group on Nursing which laid the groundwork for the Nurses Training Act of 1964. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Lillian Holland Harvery used her expertise and talents to work in and through professional organizations to advance the cause of black nurses and the nursing profession. In 1948 the first baccalaureate of nursing program in the state of Alabama, was started under her leadership. -
Dorothea Orem
She was a nursing theorist and founder of the Orem Model of Nursing. This is also known as the Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory which is based on her belief that all "patients wish to care for themselves". -
Madeleine Leininger
Madeleine Leininger is a pioneering nursing theorist. 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.She is considered by some to be the "Margaret Mead of nursing" and is recognized worldwide as the founder of transcultural nursing. -
Jean Watson
Her published works on the philosophy and theory of human caring and the art and science of caring in nursing are used by clinical nurses and academic programs throughout the world.She is founder of the Center for Human Caring in Colorado. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and has served as president of the National League for Nursing.
