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Dorothea Dix
Known as "Dragon Dix" by some, the superintendent was stern and brusque, clashing frequently with the military bureaucracy and occasionally ignoring administrative details. Army nursing care was markedly improved under her leadership due in part because she wanted women serious about work, and over 30 years old who were not looking for marriage. Later, she was an activist for female inmates and for mental health. -
Linda Richards
Linda Richards (1877) was the first professionally trained American nurse. She established nursing training programs in the United States and Japan. She also created the first system for keeping individual medical records for hospitalized patients. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first black woman to be a professional nurse in the United States graduating in 1879. Mahoney was a staunch supporter and advocate for women’s rights, equality, and the right to vote. In 1920, she was among the first women in Boston to register to vote. -
Clara Barton
Clara Barton witnessed the immense suffering on the Civil War Battlefield and did much to alleviate it. She became a "professional angel" after the war, lectured and worked on humanitarian causes relentlessly, and, of course, went on to become the first president of the American Association of the Red Cross. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
Isabel Hampton Robb (1900-1907) was one of the founders of modern American nursing theory establishing common ground in nursing ethics and educational standards. Her most notable contribution to the system of nursing education was the implementation of a grading policy for nursing students. -
Lavinia Dock
. Lavinia Dock compiled the first manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses, after serving as a visitor nurse for the poor writing Hygiene and Morality (1907). She joined the Nurses settlement in New York, where she strove to improve the health of the poor and improve the profession of nursing. She was also associated with being an early advocate of birth control. -
Annie Goodrich
Anna (Annie) Goodrich (1918) was known as a crusader and diplomat among nurses, Annie Warburton Goodrich was constantly active in local, state, national, and international nursing affairs and in 1918, she became chief inspecting nurse of the United States Army's hospitals. Goodrich also had the plan for the Army school of nursing and was the dean when it started in 1918. -
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger (1920’s-1950’s) propagated the idea of Planned Parenthood: The Negro Project II and birth control. -
Mary Breckinridge
Famous for her nurses on horseback.Mary Breckinridge was an American nurse who started the Frontier Nursing Service in the Appalachian region of Kentucky in her 40’s (1924), in order to provide health care topoor people who lived in remote mountain settlements. She was the nation's foremost pioneer in the development of American midwifery and the provision of care to the nation's rural areas as founder of the Frontier Nursing Service. -
Ida V. Moffett
Ida V. Moffett (1930-ish) was the first woman involved in achieving school accreditation, forming university-level degree programs for nursing, closing substandard nursing schools, and organizing hospital peer groups. -
Martha Rogers
Martha Rogers (1950’s) published "The Science of Unitary Man" which revolutionized nursing to view human beings, as unitary- being an "irreducible, indivisible, pan-dimensional (four-dimensional) energy field identified by pattern and manifesting characteristics that are specific to the whole and which cannot be predicted from knowledge of the parts" and "a unified whole having its own distinctive characteristics which cannot be perceived by looking at, describing, or summarizing the parts.” -
Hildegard peplau
Hildegard Peplau was responsible for the Theory of Interpersonal Relations (1952). She emphasized psychodynamic nursing; the interaction bet. two or more persons with a common goal where nurse and patient work together so both become mature and knowledgeable in the process. -
Virginia Henderson
Virginia Henderson was responsible for developing the “Need Theory” (1953) a new concept of nursing where emphasis was placed on the importance of increasing the patients independence so that progress after hospitalization would not be delayed. Her goal was to make nurses assistants to individuals so that they might gain their independence in relation to the performance of activities contributing to health or its recovery. -
Dorothea Orem
Orem’s nursing theory states that self-care as a human need, and nurses design interventions to provide or manage self-care actions for persons to recover or maintain health. She believed the individual should be self-reliant and responsible for their own care and others in their family needing care and pushed for health education -
Jean watson
Jean Watson was the founder of the original Center for Human Caring in Colorado. She was a widely published author and theorist, and her focus was mainly on human caring and loss. -
Madeleine Leininger
Madeleine Leininger developed the Transcultural Theory: the theory of diversity and universality (1995). She stated that care was the essence of nursing and is broad and wholistic and culturally congruent care.
