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Linda Richards
Richards was the first to graduate from New England Hospital for Women and Children.She is often referred to as the "first trained nurse," and her diploma resides in the Smithsonian Institute.She's famous for creating medical charts for each patient, a method still practiced today. -
Dorothea Dix
Dix served as Superintendent of Women Nurses for All Military Hospitals during the Civil War.As an advocate for the mentally ill, she is famous for starting the first Amercian mental asylums. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Known as "Mother Bickerdyke" by Civil War troops, Bickerdyke pushed the often lazy or corrupt medical officers to do a more efficient job, bettering the war hospitals. Later, the hospital ship SS Mary A. Bickerdyke was named in her honor. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
She enrolled in nursing and was one of three in a class of forty to graduate, changing the way African Americans were viewed in nursing. This opened the door for more African American acceptance into nursing schools. -
Clara Barton
Barton cared for Civil War soldiers for both the North and the South. Barton was a profound educator and nurse and in 1882, she established the still flourishing American Red Cross. -
Lavinia Dock
Dock was a nurse as well as educator. She developed one of the earliest nursing textbooks, "The Textbook on Materia Medica for Nurses." This helped pave the road to nursing education. -
Lillian Wald
Wald sought to the streets of lower eastside New York to care for poor patients that were unable to afford proper healthcare. She helped create Henry Street Nursing Service in New York to do just that. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
Robb organized the organization now known as American Nurses Association. She was the author of an early textbook called "Nursing Ethics." She sought to better the nursing profession through education and organization. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
Nutting served as head nurse for Johns Hopkins Training School for Nurses. She later became the world's first nursing professor at Columbia University in New York. As a promoter of bettering schools, she was named the honorary president of Florence Nightingale International Foundation. -
Margaret Sanger
As a nurse in lower eastside New York, Sanger saw the negative effects of surprise or unwanted pregnancies on womens' health and their families.In 1912 she gave up nursing to dedicate her time to promoting birth control and it's positive effects against societal will. -
Annie Goodrich
Goodrich served as the American Nurses Association president from 1915 to 1918. She was the director of numerous nursing schools, including Columbia University. As an advocate for nursing education, she helped develop Yale's nursing program in to a graduate program. -
Mary Breckinridge
She became a nurse due to the loss of her first husband and two children. She joined the American Committee for Devastated France after WWI, and later went to London for midwifery courses. She started the first American school to train and certify midwives. She started the Frontier Nursing Service in Appalachian Kentucky to help poor people in the mountains. -
Ida V. Moffett
Moffett was the head of nurses at Birmingham Baptist Hospital. She headed a front of bettering nursing schools by closing bad ones, by bettering existing ones, and by opening new ones. Samford University's nursing school is named in her honor. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
She served as Dean of Tuskegee University School of Nursing for approximately 30 years, which she helped make the first University in Alabama to offer a Bachelor's of Science in Nursing. She fought for racial equality in nursing professionalism during a racist 1940's. -
Hildegard Peplau
She was an Army Nurse Corps. member in WWII. She's inventing famous for the interpersonal process, which is defined as the interaction between two or more individuals with the common goal of assisting those in need of health care. She was a big influence on the psychiatric field of nursing. -
Virginia Henderson
She was famous for her belief in development and needs of the patient. She believed that nursing's role is to assist individual (sick or well) to carry out activities they would normally perform if they had the strength, knowledge, or will. -
Madeleine Leininger
She was the dean of nursing at the University of Washington. She is recognized as the founder of transcultural nursing, which became a program at UW in 1974. She sought to prove nurses must understand the cultural background of patients. -
Jean Watson
Watson is famous for her belief that caring is the central, unifying focus of nursing. She said that the most imperative point is when the nurse and the patient are first brought together. She founded the Center for Human Caring in Colorado. -
Dorothea Orem
She is the founder of the Orem Model of Nursing or the Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory. She wrote the book "Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory," which emphasizes that the patient can initiate and perform on their own behalf. -
Martha Rogers
Rogers invented the science of unitary man. This stated that nursing is humanistic and humanitarian. Nursing is also portrayed as concerned with nature and human development.
