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Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix was an American activist, on behalf of the insane, who started the first American mental asylums. She also served as Superintendent of Army Nurses during the Civil War. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Mary Ann Bickerdyke was a hospital administrator for Union soldiers during the American Civil War. She became the best known, most colorful, and probably most resourceful Civil War nurse. By the end of the war, with the help of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, she had built 300 hospitals and aided the wounded on 19 battlefields. -
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.
In 1872, Linda Richards became the first student to enroll in the beginning class of five nurses in the first American Nurse’s training school. -
Clara Barton
Clara Barton is best remembered for organizing the American Red Cross in 1881. She was also started an agency to obtain and distribute supplies to wounded soldiers after the Battle of Bun Run. -
Isabela Hampton Robb
Isabel Hampton Robb was one of the founders of American nursing theory and an important leaders in the history of nursing. One of her most notable contributions to the nursing education system was the implementation of a grading policy for nursing students. Also, 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. -
Lavinia Dock
Lavinia Dock, along with Mary Adelaide Nuttng and Isabel Hampton Robb, founded the American Society of superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses of the United States and Canada in 1893, a precursor to the current National League for Nursing. She was also a social activist and pickited the White House in 1917 for woman's suffrage. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
Mary Adelaide Nutting was an American educator, administrator, and author in the field of nursing. In 1907 she 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 Eliza Mahoney
Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African-American nurse. She graduated in 1879 and in 1908 she co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). -
Lillian Wald
Lillian D. Wald is the founder of American community nursing. She was also very concerned with the horrible treatment of African-Americans, and as a consequence, she was one of the seminal founders, in 1909, of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). -
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger was a nurse and American birth control activist and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood).
In 1914, Sanger launched "The Woman Rebel", a monthly newsletter promoting contraception. -
Annie Goodrich
Annie Goodrich was most remembered for being a pioneer in starting the Army School of Nursing, which was founded in 1918. Once it opened, she was elected as Dean. -
Mary Breckinridge
Mary Breckinridge was an American nurse/midwife. She started family care centers in the Appalachian mountains and was known for helping many people with her hospitals. In 1925 she founded the Kentucky Committee for Mothers and Babies, which soon became the Frontier Nursing Service. -
Ida V. Moffett
In 1943 Ida Moffett organized the first unit of Cadet Nurse Corps in Alabama, a federal program of the Public Health Service that was established to overcome a shortage of nurses, and oversaw construction of a second building for the School of Nursing. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Lillian Holland Harvey graduated nursing school on 1933. She became the Dean of Nursing at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1948 and started the state's first baccalaureate of nursing program. -
Hildegard Peplau
Hildegard Peplau was a nursing theorist whose work "Interpersonal Relations in Nursing" was published in 1952. -
Dorothea Orem
Dorothea Elizabeth Orem was a nursing theorist and founder of the Orem model of nursing, or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory, that states that nurses have to supply care when the patients cannot provide care to themselves which she published in 1959. -
Madeleine Leininger
Madeleine Leininger is a pioneering nursing theorist, who published her first book 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. -
Virginia Hernderson
Virginia Henderson, was an American nurse, researcher, theorist and author. She is most famous for her 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".
In 1985 she was presented with the first Christianne Reimann Prize from the International Council of Nurses. -
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 well known book, An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing, published in 1989.
