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Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Bickerdyke was a union nurse in the American Civil War. Generally called Mother Bickerdyke, she served throughout the war in the West and was beloved by the enlisted men. She assisted doctors in Cincinnati, Ohio, during the cholera epidemic of 1837. -
Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix visited the Cambridge House of Corrections to teach sunday class to women. The scenes that she saw led her to demand reforms fo the mentally ill. In 1845 Dix wrote Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States. Dix was also appointed as the superindentent of nurses for the union army in 1861. During this this time she recruited over 2,000 women to serve. -
Clara Barton
After the Battle of Bull Run, she established an agency to obtain and distribute supplies to wounded soldiers during the Civil War. In July 1862, she obtained permission to travel behind the lines, eventually reaching some of the grimmest battlefields of the war. Barton delivered aid to soldiers of both the North and South. In 1881 she established the American Red Cross, and served as its director until her death. -
Linda Richards
Richards was the first student to enroll and graduate from New England Hospital for Women and Children. By 1874 Linda was ready to take over the floundering Boston Training School. Her administrative experience with Sister Helen helped her turn the program around and it became one of the best nurse training programs in the country. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mahoney was the first African-American registered nurse in the United States. In 1896, Mahoney became one of the original members of a predominately white Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada. In 1908 she was cofounder of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). -
Lavinia Dock
After serving as a visiting nurse among the poor, in 1890 she compiled the first, and long most important, manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses. Working closely with Lillian Wald, she strove not only to improve the health of the poor but also to improve the profession of nursing through her teaching, lecturing, and writing. -
Lillian Wald
Lillian Wald graduated from nursing school in 1891. She took postgraduate courses where her assignment was to organize a plan for home nursing to meet the needs of the poor immigrant families on the Lower East Side of New York. She was the founder of the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service and of the Henry Street Settlement. 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. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
The American Nurses Association's first president, Isabel Hampton Robb, was the nursing profession's prime mover in organizing at the national level. In 1896, Robb organized the group known as the Nurses' Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada. In 1911 the group was renamed the American Nurses Association. She graduated from the Bellevue Hospital Training School for Nurses, which she had entered in 1881. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
Nutting entered the first class of the new Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing in Baltimore, Maryland graduating in 1891. After graduating in, she served as a head nurse at the school. In 1894, she became the school's principal and held this position until 1907. That year, she joined the faculty of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City and became the world's first professor of nursing. She headed the Department of Nursing and Health at the college from 1910 until 1925. -
Margaret Sanger
Sanger worked with poor women on the Lower East Side of New York, she was aware of the effects of unplanned and unwelcome pregnancies. Her mother's health had suffered as she bore eleven children. She came to believe in the importance to women's lives and women's health of the availability of birth control, a term which she's credited with inventing. In 1912, Sanger gave up nursing work to dedicate herself to the distribution of birth control information. -
Annie Goodrich
Annie Goodrich was known as a crusader and diplomat among nurses, she was constantly active in local, state, national, and international nursing affairs. She was a graduate of the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses. She served as president of the American Nurses Association from 1915 to 1918. In 1924 she became dean of, the first nursing program at Yale University. She was responsible for developing the program into the Yale Graduate School of Nursing ten years later. -
Virginia Henderson
Henderson defined nursing as "assisting individuals to gain independence in relation to the performance of activities contributing to health or its recovery," which she is famous for. She graduated from the Army School of Nursing in Washington, D.C. in 1921. She holds twelve honorary doctoral degrees and has received the International Council of Nursing's Christianne Reimann Prize, which is considered nursing's most prestigious award. -
Mary Breckinridge
Breckinridge 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 became Registered Nurse number 1830 in Alabama on June 3, 1926. Ida dedicated her life to providing quality care and creating standardized nursing education. A pioneer in setting standards for healthcare, she became the first woman involved in achieving school accreditation, in forming university- level degree programs for nursing, in licensing practical nursing, and in starting junior college-level degree programs for nursing. -
Hildegard Peplau
Hildegard E. Peplau, known as the "mother of psychiatric nursing," was the only nurse to serve the ANA as executive director and later as president, she served two terms on the Board of the International Council of Nurses. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Harvey completed her own doctor of education degree from Teachers College at Columbia University. In 1978, she was the first person named Dean Emeritus by Tuskegee University. She started the first baccalaureate program for nursing in Alabama. -
Dorothea Orem
In 1949 Orem began to create to her definition of the nursing practice. Orem's first publication of the "Concept of Practice" was in 1971. Orem continued to develop her theory even after retirement in 1984. -
Martha Rogers
Rogers is widely known for her discovery of the science of unitary human beings, she provided a framework for continued study and research, and influenced the development of a variety of modalities, including therapeutic touch. Over a long and productive career, she demonstrated leadership skill and a futuristic vision that improved nursing education, practice, and research in the United States and internationally. -
Madeleine Leininger
Leininger is a pioneering nursing theorist, first published in the early 1980s. Her nursing theory involves the discussion of what it is to care. She developed the concept of transcultural nursing, bringing the role of cultural factors in nursing practice into the discussion of how to best attend to those in need of nursing care. -
Jean Watson
Dr. Jean Watson is Distinguished Professor of Nursing and holds an endowed Chair in Caring Science at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. The foundation of Jean Watson%u2019s theory of nursing was published in 1979 in nursing: %u201CThe philosophy and science of caring.%u201D In 1988, her theory was published in %u201Cnursing: human science and human care%u201D. She believes that for nurses to develop humanistic philosophies and value system, a strong liberal arts background is necessary.
