Historical Nurses

  • Dorothea Dix

    Dorothea Dix
    Dorothea Dix has been described as "the most effective advocate of humanitarian reform in American mental institutions during the nineteenth century".Dix became the Union's Superintendent of Female Nurses during the Civil War.
  • Clara Barton

    Clara Barton
    Clara Barton's civil war work began in April 1861. After the Battle of Bull Run, she established an agency to obtain and distribute supplies to wounded soldiers .In 1881 she established the American Red Cross, and served as its director until her death
  • Mary Ann Bickerdyke

    Mary Ann Bickerdyke
    Bickerdyke began accompanying the soldiers into battle, working in field hospitals alongside doctors who would perform quick surgeries and then move on to the next battered man.
  • Mary Eliza Mahoney

    Mary Eliza Mahoney
    Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African-American registered nurse in the U.S. In 1878, at the age of thirty-three, she was admitted as a student into the hospital's nursing program established by Dr. Marie Zakrzewska.
  • Lavinia Dock

    Lavinia Dock
    she compiled the first, and long most important, manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses (1890).She played a major role as a contributing editor to the American Journal of Nursing and she linked American nurses' goals to similar efforts in England.
  • Isabel Hampton Robb

    Isabel Hampton Robb
    In 1896, Robb organized the group known as the Nurses' Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada. The group was renamed the American Nurses Association in 1911. Earlier, in 1893, Robb gathered together a nucleus of women who were superintendents of schools and founded the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses.
  • Mary Adelaide Nutting

    Mary Adelaide Nutting
    Nutting joined the faculty of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City and became the world's first professor of nursing. Nutting headed the Department of Nursing and Health at the college from 1910 until she retired in 1925.
  • Margaret Sanger

    Margaret Sanger
    In 1912, Sanger gave up nursing work to dedicate herself to the distribution of birth control information.
  • Lillian Wald

    Lillian Wald
    Lillian D. Wald was the founder of the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service and of the Henry Street Settlement (1915). She was also responsible for the instruction of nurses in the public schools and for insurance companies providing free visiting nurses for their policy holders
  • Annie Goodrich

    Annie Goodrich
    she saw the nursing and medical professions as equals.She lived in an age when nurses received their training in hospital schools of nursing, and she sought to introduce nursing to the university and pioneered the inclusion of preventive medicine and community nursing courses in the curriculum.
    Goodrich would be the originator of the plan for the Army school of nursing. It was started in 1918 as a war measure, with Annie Goodrich as dean
  • Mary Breckinridge

    Mary Breckinridge
    Breckinridge was the first to bring nurse-midwifery to the United States and founder of the Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing.
  • Dorothea Orem

    Dorothea Orem
    One of America’s foremost nursing theorists.1940-1949 Orem held directorship of both nursing school and the department of nursing at Providence Hospital in Detroit.. Her goal was to upgrade the quality of nursing in general hospitals throughout the state. 1959 first published her theory in “Guides for Developing Curricula for the Education of Practical Nurses”
  • Ida V. Moffett

    Ida V. Moffett
    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. In 1968 the Board of Trustees of Baptist Medical Centers of Birmingham renamed the school of nursing to honor Ida V. Moffett, and the name was retained when the school became part of Samford University in 1973.
  • Martha Rogers

    Martha Rogers
    Rogers was appointed Head of the Division of Nursing at New York University in 1954. In about 1963 Martha edited a journal called Nursing Science. It was during that time that Rogers was beginning to formulate ideas about the publication of her third book An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing
  • Madeleine Leininger

    Madeleine Leininger
    Dr. Madeleine Leininger is the foundress of the worldwide Transcultural Nursing movement. She remains as one of nursing's most prolific writers and the foremost authority throughout the world in the field of cultural care.
  • Virginia Henderson

    Virginia Henderson
    Virginia Henderson defined nursing as "assisting individuals to gain independence in relation to the performance of activities contributing to health or its recovery". Her famous definition of nursing was one of the first statements clearly delineating nursing from medicine:
  • Jean Watson

    Jean Watson
    Watson is a Distinguished Professor of Nursing and former Dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Colorado, as well as founder of the Center for Human Caring. The Theory of Human Caring was developed between 1975-1979. This theorist believed that through love and caring, better care for the patient will be given. “The philosophy and science of caring”
  • Linda Richards

    Linda Richards
    Linda Richards was the first professionally trained American nurse. She established nursing training programs in the United States and Japan, and created the first system for keeping individual medical records for hospitalized patients.In an effort to upgrade her skills, Richards took an intensive, seven-month nurse training program in England in 1877. She consulted with Florence Nightingale, Then Richards pioneered the founding and superintending of nursing training schools across the nation.
  • Hildegard Peplau

    Hildegard Peplau
    known as the "mother of psychiatric nursing,"Peplau's seminal book, Interpersonal Relations in Nursing, was completed in 1948,She also identified six nursing roles of the nurse as counseling role, leadership role, surrogate role, stranger, resource, and teaching role.
  • Lillian Holland Harvey

    Lillian Holland Harvey
    Dr. Lillian Harvey was Dean of the Tuskegee (Institute) University School of Nursing for almost three decades. Under her leadership and untiring efforts, the School of Nursing at Tuskegee became the first to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing in the state of Alabama