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Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Lynde Dix was a teacher and then a social reformer for the treatment of the mentally ill. She began a change in mental institutions of the United States when she was thirty-one. And by the time she was fifty-four she had covered half of the United States and Europe inspecting institutions for mistreatment. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
She was a Civil War Union Army Nurse. She followed and assisted at any point as the Union Army moved from one battle to another. She began to get more help from officials in the army and in 1862 was officially given a job paying fifty dollars a month as a sanitary field agent. -
Linda Richards
She was the first graduate of the nurse-training program at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in 1873. She was also the first professionally trained American nurse and credited with establishing nurse training programs in different parts of the United States and in Japan. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
In March 1878, at the age of thirty-three, she was admitted to the nursing program at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. She was one of four who received her nursing certification on August 1,1879, making her the first African-American in history to earn a professional nursing license. -
Clara Barton
At age sixty, she founded the American Red Cross in 1881 and led it for the next twenty three years. On August 22nd of the same year, she started the first local Red Cross in the St. Paul’s United Lutheran Church in Dansville, New York. -
Lavinia Dock
She was a nurse and a social reformer. After serving as a visiting nurse among the poor, she compiled the first, and long most important, manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses in 1890. -
Lillian Wald
She started the Visiting Nurse Service in 1893. Two years later, she established the Henry Street Settlement to further aid those in need. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
In 1896, she became the first President of the Nurses' Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada, which would later become the American Nurses Association. She also helped to found the American Journal of Nurses. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
She joined the faculty of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City in 1907 and became the world's first professor of nursing. She headed the Department of Nursing and Health at the college from 1910 until she retired in 1925. -
Margaret Sanger
She gave up nursing work to dedicate herself to the distribution of birth control information in 1912. However, the Comstock Act of 1873 was used to forbid distribution of birth control devices and information. In 1914 she founded the National Birth Control League. -
Virginia Henderson
She graduated from the Army School of Nursing, Washington, D.C., in 1921. She is part of the "Columbia school" of nursing theory. She also wrote and/or edited several editions of the The Principles and Practice of Nursing. -
Annie Goodrich
She was the first woman Dean at Yale University's School of Nursing starting in 1923. She received the Yale Medal for outstanding service to Yale University and did so in the belief that a nurse must be "technically skilled, scientifically informed, and socially experienced." -
Mary Breckinridge
She established the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) in 1925 to provide professional health care in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. The FNS staff started the American Association of Nurse-Midwives as well. -
Ida V. Moffett
She had a driving force behind numerous successful efforts to bring professionalism and advanced academic training to the field of nursing. 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. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Under her leadership, in 1948 the first baccalaureate of nursing program in the state of Alabama was started. This program brought national attention to the School of Nursing. -
Hildegard Peplau
She was known as the "mother of psychiatric nursing," She established the first nursing post-baccalaureate program and eventually held the title of executive director and president of the American Nurses Association. -
Dorothea Orem
She was the founder of the Orem model of Nursing (Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory). Orem's self-care deficit theory of nursing is composed of three related theories: 1) the theory of self-care 2) the theory of self-care deficit 3) the theory of nursing systems. -
Martha Rogers
She first published her model of human interaction and the nursing process in 1970 when she published An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing. This view presented a drastic but attractive way of viewing human interaction and the nursing process. -
Madeleine Leininger
She is considered by some to be the "Margaret Mead of nursing" and is recognized worldwide as the founder of transcultural nursing, a program that she created at the University of Washington, School of Nursing in 1974. It was to support the research of the Transcultural Nursing Society. -
Jean Watson
She is founder of the original Center for Human Caring in Colorado and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She previously served as Dean of Nursing at the University Health Sciences Center and is a Past President of the National League for Nursing. The foundation of Jean Watson’s theory of nursing was published in 1979 in nursing: “The philosophy and science of caring”
