Timeline: Women Who Shaped the Nursing Profession

Jul 10, 1851

Dorothea Dix founded the first public mental hospital, the Harrisburg State Hospital in Pennsylvania

Jul 10, 1874

Linda Richards heads the Boston Training School and turns it into one of the best nursing programs in the U.S.

Richards was the first American trained nurse.
She created a system that kept track of each individual patient’s medical records.

Jul 10, 1879

Mary Eliza Mahoney is the first African American to graduate with a professional nursing license

She cofounded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908, which focused on improving African American status in nursing

Jul 10, 1881

Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross

Jul 10, 1907

Isabel Hampton Robb writes and publishes Education Standards for Nurses

Robb was appointed head of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in 1889. She contributed to nursing in the field of education, writing and publishing Nursing Ethics in 1900.

Jul 10, 1921

Lavinia Dock wrote Materia Medica for Nurses, one of the first nursing textbooks

Jul 10, 1923

Margaret Sanger opens the first legal birth control clinic in America

Jul 10, 1924

Annie Goodrich develops the first nursing program at Yale University, as well as became its dean

Goodrich was president of the American Nurses Association (ANA) from 1915-1918

Jul 10, 1925

Mary Breckinridge establishes the Frontier Nursing Service

FNS allowed people in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky, a very poor region in the U.S., to receive professional nurse health care

Jul 10, 1950

Hildegard Peplau founded and taught the first classes for graduate nurses specializing in psychiatric health at Teachers College

Peplau is often referred to as the “mother of psychiatric nursing." She also taught the theory based on interpersonal care, with both individual and group therapy.

Jul 10, 1963

Martha Rogers develops the Science of Unitary Human Beings

Jul 10, 1967

Ida V. Moffett becomes Chief of Nursing at Birmingham Baptist Hospital

Moffett was a big contributor to health care in Alabama.
She became Head Nurse at Highland Avenue Baptist Hospital in 1934.
The Birmingham Baptist Hospitals School of Nursing changed its named in 1968 to Ida V. Moffett School of Nursing.