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Dorothea Dix
Dix was the Union's Superintendent of Female Nurses during the Civil War. She spent more than 20 years working for improved treatment of mentally ill patients. -
Clara Barton
Clara Barton was considered "Angel of the Battlefield" during the Civil War. She became the superintendent of Union nurses in 1864. She was also president of the American National Red Cross for 22 years. -
Linda Richards
Richards was the first student to enroll and graduate from a nursing program. Linda created a system for charting and maintaining individual medical records for each patient. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
On August 1, 1879, Mahoney received her nursing diploma, becoming the first African American graduate nurse.
In 1896, Mahoney became one of the first African-American members of the predominantly white American Nurses Association (ANA). In 1908, she cofounded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Bickerdyke was a Civil War Union Army. She studied botanical medicine which stressed the benefits of clean water-inhaling steam. She was given the nickname "Mother" by Union -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
She was a graduate of the first class of the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing. In 1934 she was named honorary president of the Florence Nightingale International Foundation, and in 1944 the National League of Nursing Education created the Mary Adelaide Nutting Medal in her honor and awarded it to her that year. -
Lavinia Dock
Dock compiled the first, and long most important, manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses. 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
Wald was 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
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. Robb was one of the original members of the committee to found the American Journal of Nursing. -
Margaret Sanger
In 1914, Sanger's articles in The Woman Radical brought her a federal indictment for violating federal postal obscenity laws, prompting her to flee to England. She later opened the first birth control clinic in the United States. -
Mary Breckinridge
Before Mary Breckinridge began the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS), childbirth was primitive in remote, rural areas. Breckinridge later founded the first school in America that trained and certified midwifes. -
Annie Goodrich
Known as a crusader and diplomat among nurses, Annie Warburton Goodrich was constantly active in local, state, national, and international nursing affairs. Goodrich served as president of the American Nurses Association from 1915 to 1918. In 1924 she became dean of the 1st nursing school at Yale University. -
Virginia Henderson
Henderson defined nursing as "assisting individuals to gain independence in relation to the performance of activities contributing to health or its recovery". She was one of the first nurses to point out that nursing does not consist of merely following physician's orders. -
Ida V. Moffett
Moffet was the first woman involved in achieving school accreditation, in forming university- level degree programs for nursing, in closing substandard nursing schools, in organizing hospital peer groups, in licensing practical nursing, and in starting junior college-level degree programs for nurses. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Harvey was a nurse educator and dean of Nursing at historically all black, Tuskegee University. Dr. Harvey was credited with being a crusader for unrestricted professional recognition across the state and nation. -
Hildegard Peplau
Peplau is often recognised as the %u2018mother of psychiatric nursing%u2019.
She is the only nurse to serve the ANA as executive director and later as president. -
Martha Rogers
Rogers is best known for developing the Science of Unitary Human Beings and her landmark book, An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing. She specialized in public health nursing, and she established the Visiting Nurse Service of Phoenix, Arizona. -
Dorothea Orem
Orem was a nursing theorist and founder of the Orem model of nursing, or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory. -
Jean Watson
Watson proposes a philosophy and science of caring.
Watson is well known for her Theory of Human/Transpersonal Caring. -
Madeleine Leininger
Leininger's main contribution to nursing is the Culture Care Diversity and Universality Theory. In this the theory, culturally congruent care is essential for clients for their well being or to gain and remain healthy. One of the origins of this theory is the increasing multiculturalism around the globe.
