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Dorthea Dix
Dorthea Dix commited her life to improving the facilities used to house the mentally ill. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Mary Ann Bickerdyke was the organizer and chief of nursing, hospital, and welfare services for the armies under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War. -
Clara Barton
Clara Barton was a nurse in the Civil War and is best known as the founder of the American Red Cross in the 1870s -
Linda Richards
Linda Richards was the first professionally trained nurse and was crediteed with establishing nursing programs in the US and Japan. She was also responsible for creating the first system for keeping individual medical records. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mary Eliza Mahoney graduated from nursing school in 1879 and was the first black nurse in the US. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
Isabel Hampton Robb was appointed superintendent of nurses at the Illinois Training School. Whilemade some important changes in the way nursing was taught. While there she established the first grading policy in a nursing school.
In 1889, she moved to become head of a newly established nursing school at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. -
Lavinia Dock
Lavinia Dock compiled the first manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses in 1890. -
Lillian Wald
In 1893, Lillian Wald helped to establish the Henry Street Settlement and the New York public health nursing service. She also helped organize the first public school nursing services in New York City, as well as Lincoln House, one of the first settlements with an African American patients. She was a founding member of the NAACP. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
In 1907, Mary Nutting joined the faculty of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City and became the world's first professor of nursing. -
Lillian Wald
Lillian Wald was one of the founders of the NAACP in 1909 and is today known as the founder of visiting nursing -
Martha Sanger
Martha Sanger founded the first birth control clinic in the US in 1916. She went on to found the American Birth Control League in 1921, which later became known as Planned Parenthood Federation of America. -
Annie Goodrich
Annie Goodrich was the organizing dean of the Army School of Nursing in 1918 and the first dean and professor of Yale University School of Nursing in 1923 -
Mary Breckinridge
In 1925, Mary Breckenridge organized the Kentucky Committee for Mothers and Babies, later called the Frontier Nursing Service. Her service provided midwifes, nursing centers, and hospitals to povery stricken people in Southeastern Kentucky. -
Ida V. Moffett
Ida Moffett organized Alabama's first Cadet Nurse Corps unit in 1943 and oversaw expansion of the nursing school facilities at the hospital.
In 1946 Moffett was appointed by Governor Chauncey Sparks to the Alabama State Board of Nurses' Examiners and Registration, which she chaired. She worked to achieve state accreditation for Tuskegee University's four-year college program in nursing. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Lillian Harvey was Dean of Tuskegee University School of Nursing for almost three decades. Under her leadership, the School of Nursing at Tuskegee became the first to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing in the state of Alabama. -
Dorthea Orem
Dorthea Orem was a nursing theorist and founder of the Orem model of nursing, or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory. The theory states that nurses have to supply care when the patients cannot provide care to themselves. -
Martha Rogers
Martha Rogers specialized in public health nursing and is best known for developing Science of Unitary Human Beings and her book An Introduction to Theoretical Basis of Nursing. -
Virginia Henderson
Virginia Henderson authored one of the most widely used definitions of nursing and was known as the "the first lady of nursing". -
Madeleine Leininger
In 1969 following a trip to New Guinea, Leininger began to see the need for nurses to understand their patients’ culture and background in order to provide care. She is recognized worldwide as the founder of transcultural nursing. -
Hildegard Peplau
Hildegard Peplau was known as the "mother of psychiatric nursing". She was the only nurse to serve the ANA as executive director and president. In 1997, she received nursing's highest honor, the Christiane Reimann Prize, at the ICN Quadrennial Congress. In 1996, the American Academy of Nursing honored Peplau as a "Living Legend." -
Jean Watson
Jean Watson founded the Center for Caring and International Caritas Consortum.
