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Dorothea Dix
Dorothea volunteered to form an Army Nursing Corps. She was made Superintendent of Nurses for the Union Army. Though in poor health, she missed not one day's work. She organized hundreds of women volunteers into a nursing corps, established and inspected hospitals and raised money for medical supplies. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Mother Bickerdyke, as she was referred to, 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 including the Battle of Shiloh and Sherman's March to the Sea. -
Clara Barton
Despite life-threatening conditions, she provided supplies and care to troops in the American Civil War and became known as "The Angel of the Battlefield." In April 1862, after the First Battle of Bull Run, Barton established an agency to obtain and distribute supplies to wounded soldiers. Almost singlehandedly she founded the American Red Cross, which has provided comfort in times of crisis since 1882. -
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. Longing for more skills, in 1877 Richards went to England to participate in an intensive, seven-month nurse training program. She studied at St. Thomas's Hospital in London, where she was able to spend some time with Florence Nightingale. -
Lillian Wald
Wald coined the term %u201Cpublic health nurse%u201D in 1893 for nurses who worked outside hospitals in poor and middle-class communities. Specializing in both preventative care and the preservation of health, these nurses responded to referrals from physicians and patients, and received fees based on the patient%u2019s ability to pay. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
Nutting was the first nurse ever to be appointed to a university professorship. Earlier in her career, in 1894, Nutting became principal of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, where she had graduated from in 1891. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
In 1896, Robb organized the group known as the Nurses' Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada. The group was renamed the American Nurses Association in 1911. Earlier, in 1893, Robb gathered together a nucleus of women who were superintendents of schools and founded the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses. -
Lavinia Dock
In 1896, Dock began a 20-year tenure at the Henry Street Settlement, improving access to health care for the impoverished inhabitants of New York%u2019s Lower East Side. To advance nursing education, she authored one of the first nursing textbooks, Materia Medica for Nurses, and worked as an editor for the American Journal of Nursing. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mahoney was America's first black professional nurse. In 1909, Mahoney gave the welcome address at the first conference of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). In recognition of her outstanding example to nurses of all races, NACGN established the Mary Mahoney Award in 1936. -
Margaret Sanger
Sanger was an American birth control activist, an advocate of certain aspects of eugenics, and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood). In 1916 she opened a clinic in Brooklyn, was arrested, and served thirty days for distributing information about contraceptives. -
Annie Goodrich
Goodrich established the United States Student Nurse Reserve, more commonly known as the Army School of Nursing, in 1918-1919. In 1923, she became 1st Dean of the new Yale University School of Nursing begun with money from Rockefeller Foundation. -
Mary Breckinridge
Mary Breckinridge introduced a model rural health care system into the United States in 1925. she created a decentralized system of nurse-midwives, district nursing centers, and hospital facilities. Originally called the Kentucky Committee for Mothers and Babies, later the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS). Staff members of the FNS formed the beginnings of the American College of Nurse-Midwives in 1929. The FNS began its own school in 1939. -
Ida V. Moffett
In 1943 she organized Alabama's first unit of the Cadet Nurse Corps, 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. In 1968 the Board of Trustees of Baptist Medical Centers of Birmingham renamed the school of nursing to honor Ida V. Moffett, and the name was retained when the school became part of Samford University in 1973. -
Lillian Holland harvey
Dr. Lillian Harvey was Dean of the Tuskegee (Institute) University School of Nursing for almost three decades. Under her leadership and untiring efforts, the School of Nursing at Tuskegee became the first to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing in the state of Alabama. -
Hildegard Peplau
Hildegard Peplau used the term, psychodynamic nursing, to describe the dynamic relationship between a nurse and a patient. She also identified six nursing roles of the nurse as counseling role, leadership role, surrogate role, stranger, resource, and teaching role. -
Dorothea Orem
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. It is particularly used in rehabilitation and primary care settings where the patient is encouraged to be as independent as possible -
Virginia Henderson
She holds twelve honorary doctoral degrees and has received the International Council of Nursing's Christianne Reimann Prize, which is considered nursing's most prestigious award. Henderson was funded to direct the Nursing Studies Index Project from 1959 to 1971. The outcome of this project was publication of the four-volume Nursing Studies Index, the first annotated index of nursing research. -
Martha Rogers
Widely known for her discovery of the science of unitary human beings, Martha E. Rogers provided a framework for continued study and research, and influenced the development of a variety of modalities, including therapeutic touch. Rogers wrote three books that enriched the learning experience and influenced the direction of nursing research for countless students: Educational Revolution in Nursing (1961), Reveille in Nursing (1964), and An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing (1970). -
Madeleine Leininger
Dr. Madeleine Leininger is the foundress of the worldwide Transcultural Nursing movement in 1974, bringing the role of cultural factors in nursing practice into the discussion of how to best attend to those in need of nursing care. -
Jean Watson
Watson is a Distinguished Professor of Nursing and former Dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Colorado, as well as founder of the Center for Human Caring. The Theory of Human Caring was developed between 1975-1979. This theorist believed that through love and caring, better care for the patient will be given.
