Nursing Leaders Throughout the Ages

Lavina Dock

Jun 10, 1858

Lavina Dock was born in 1858 and chose to train as a nurse at New York City's Bellevue Hospital), and after serving as a visiting nurse among the poor, she compiled the first, and long most important, manual of drugs for nurses
she campaigned for legislation to allow nurses rather than physicians to control their profession

Clara Barton

Jun 10, 1860

Clara Barton worked in Washington as the first woman clerk in the Patent Office, for a salary equal to the men's. She struggled with an overwhelming work load and then fell ill with malaria in 1860

Dorothea Dix

Jun 10, 1860

During the Civil War, Dorothea Dix was appointed Superintendent of Union Army Nurses. Unfortunately, the qualities that made her a successful crusader—independence, single-minded zeal—did not lend themselves to managing a large organization of female nurses.

Linda Richards

Jun 10, 1874

By 1874 Linda Richards was ready to take over the floundering Boston Training School. Her administrative experience with Sister Helen helped her turn the program around and it became one of the best nurse training programs in the country.

Margaret Sanger

Jun 10, 1879

Margaret Higgins Sanger Slee (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966) 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.

Mary Mahoney

Jun 10, 1879

Completing a rigorous sixteen-month program on August 1, 1879, Mahoney was among the three graduates out of the forty students who began the program and the only African American awarded a diploma. Upon her graduation Mary Mahoney became the first African American graduate nurse.

Isabel Hampton Robb

Jun 10, 1883

Isabel Hampton Robb was one of the founders of modern American nursing theory and one of the most important leaders in the history of nursing. She graduated from the Bellevue Hospital Training School for Nurses in 1883.

Annie Goodrich

Jan 1, 1893

Annie Goodrich graduated and remained at New York Hospital until 1893, leaving to become superintendent of nurses at New York Postgraduate Hospital, where she became involved in nurse education.

Virginia Henderson

Jun 10, 1898

The International Council of Nurses presented her with the first Christianne Reimann Prize in June 1985, aged 87. She was also an honorary fellow of the UK's Royal College of Nursing.
• First full-time nursing instructor in Virginia
• Recipient of the Virginia Historical Nurse Leader Award
• Member of the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame
• Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing
• Authored one of the most widely used definitions of nursing

Mary Breckinridge

Jun 10, 1925

Mary Breckinridge introduced a model rural health care system into the United States in 1925. To provide professional services to neglected people of a thousand square mile area in southeastern Kentucky, she created a decentralized system of nurse-midwives, district nursing centers, and hospital facilities.

Ida Moffett

Jun 10, 1926

Registered Nurse number 1830 in Alabama on June 3, 1926.
After Ida V. Moffett graduated, she worked in a physician’s office and served a private duty nurse at Baptist Hospital. Local physicians arranged for her to go away for a year’s post graduate study

Jean Watson

Jun 10, 1940

Dr. Jean Watson was born in the 1940s has earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in nursing and psychiatric-mental health nursing and holds her PhD in educational. She is the recipient of several national awards, including The Fetzer Institute Norman Cousins Award.

Martha Rogers

Jun 10, 1945

Martha Rogers went on to specialize in public health nursing, working in Michigan, Connecticut, and Arizona, where she established the Visiting Nurse Service of Phoenix, Arizona. She continued her education, receiving a M.A. in public health nursing from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1945, an M.P.H. in 1952 and a Sc.D. in 1954, both from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Hildegard Peplau

Jun 10, 1952

After Hildegard Peplau graduated from the Pottstown, Pennsylvania Hospital School of Nursing in 1931 she worked as an operating room supervisor at Pottstown Hospital.

Madeleine Leininger

Jun 10, 1961

madeleine leininger is a pioneering nursing theorist, first published 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.

Dorothea Orem

Jun 10, 1980

Dorothea Orem was a nursing theorist and founder of the Orem model of nursing, or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory.
In simplest terms, this theory states that nurses have to supply care when the patients cannot provide care to themselves.