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Dorothea Dix
Dorothea was assigned to teach a Sunday's school class to inmates in a local prison. Upon seeing the conditions in which the inmates were living, she decided to act and help get their living quaters improved. She traveled the world improving conditions for the mentally ill. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Generally called Mother Bickerdyke, she served throughout the war in the West and was beloved by the enlisted men, whose rights she championed. -
Linda Richards
The first professionally trained American nurse, Linda Richards is credited with establishing nurse training programs in various parts of the United States and in Japan. She also is recognized for creating the first system for keeping individual medical records for hospitalized patients. -
Clara Barton
Clara traveled from camp to camp during battles such as the Battle of the Wilderness. By the end of the war Barton had performed most of the services that would later he associated with the American Red Cross, which she founded in 1881. -
Lavinia Dock
Born into a prosperous family, she chose to train as a nurse at New York City's Bellevue Hospital, and 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. After spells at Johns Hopkins and Cook County hospitals, she joined the Nurses' Settlement in New York City. -
Isabel Hampton Robb
In 1896, Robb organized the group known as the Nurses' Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada. This organization became the National League of Nursing Education in 1912. Robb was one of the original members of the committee to found the American Journal of Nursing. -
Lillian Wald
Lillian D. Wald 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. -
Margaret Sanger
In 1916 (1917 according to some sources), Sanger set up the first birth control clinic in the United States, and the following year, she was sent to the workhouse for "creating a public nuisance." -
Mary Breckinridge
The death of her two children motivated Breckinridge to devote her life to improving the health of others. In 1918 she traveled to the slums of WashingtonDC, to nurse those fallen ill in the influenza epidemic. -
Annie Goodrich
A graduate of the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses, served as president of the American Nurses Association from 1915 to 1918. And in 1924 she became dean of the first nursing program at Yale University. -
Ida V. Moffett
Dedicated her life to nursing, sometimes having 3 full time jobs, and never stopped going. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
During her lifetime, Nutting made significant contributions to nursing literature. She wrote A Sound Economic Basis for Nursing, co-authored with Lavinia Dock the first two volumes of the four-volume History of Nursing, and wrote many articles for nursing and health periodicals. -
Martha Rogers
Rogers' early nursing practice was in rural public health nursing in Michigan and in visiting nurse supervision, education, and practice in Connecticut. She then established the Visiting Nurse Service of Phoenix, Arizona. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
In 1948 the first baccalaureate of nursing program in the state of Alabama, was started under her leadership. -
Virginia Henderson
She categorized nursing activities into 14 components, based on human needs. She described the nurse's role as substitutive (doing for the person), supplementary (helping the person), or complementary (working with the person), with the goal of helping the person become as independent as possible. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
While Mary Mahoney was one of the first black nurses in the American Nurses Association, those who followed her were slow to be admitted to the ANA. Undaunted, she threw her support behind the formation of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. -
Madeleine Leininger
Madeline Leininger was a pioneer nurse anthropologist. Appointed dean of the University of Washington, School of Nursing in 1969. -
Dorothea Orem
She was a nursing theorist and founder of the Orem model of nursing, or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory, stating that nurses have to supply care when the patients cannot provide care to themselves. -
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 . -
Hildegard Peplau
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 (ICN). 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," and, in 1998, the ANA inducted her into its Hall of Fame.
