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Linda Richards
Linda Richards is known as America's very first professionally trained nurse. She is credited for establishing many nurse training programs across the United States and also in Japan. Richards also was credited for creating a system for keeping individual patient's medical records. -
Clara Barton
Clara Barton was educated at home, and at 15 started teaching school. She then went on to establish a free public school in Bordentown, N.J. She is remembered as the founder of the American Red Cross, yet her only prewar medical experience came when from 2 years of nursing a sick brother. -
Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix is known for establishing the first generation of American mental hospitals after many years of lobbying with Congress. Dix was an American activist who did not give up on what she believed. During the Civil War, she served as Superintendent of Army Nurses. -
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Mary served as a nurse and health care provider for the Union army during America's Civil War. Because of her extreme efforts to provide such great quality healthcare during such a strenuous time, Mary became known as "Mother Bickerdyke". She is remembered as one of America's pioneer nurses. -
Lavinia Dock
Lavinia Dock worked hard to improve the health of the poor but also to improve the profession of nursing through her teaching, lecturing, and writing. 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. Dock retired from nursing and served as an outspoken activist. She wanted better working conditions, the elimination of prostitution, and women's rights. -
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. The group was renamed the American Nurses Association in 1911. -
Lillian Wald
Lillian Wald was the founder of the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service and the Henry Street Settlement. She was responsible for the instruction of nurses in the public schools and for insurance companies providing free visiting nurses for their policy holders. -
Mary Adelaide Nutting
Mary Adelaide Nutting was a studente in the first class of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School for Nurses. After graduation, she served as a head nurse at the school. Later on, she became the school's principal. Nutting 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. -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mahoney was the first profession African-American nurse. In 1896, Mahoney became one of the original members of a mostly white Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada (later known as the American Nurses Association). She was cofounder of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. Mahoney played a key role in an effort to stop racial criticism and segregation in America's nursing schools and hospitals. -
Annie Goodrich
After serving many years as a nurse in New York Hospital, Annie Goodrich went on to establish the United States Student Nurse Reserve, also known as the Army School of Nursing, in 1918-1919. In 1923, she became 1st Dean of the new Yale University School of Nursing begun with money from Rockefeller Foundation. -
Margaret Sanger
Sanger is known for her efforts in providing women in the United States with birth control. She believed women should have the option of a planned birth. Margaret Sanger faced many obstacles as she tried to change the law in a fight for women's rights. -
Virginia Henderson
Henderson is known for her definition of nursing: "The unique function of the nurse is to assist the individual, sick or well, in the performance of those activities contributing to health or its recovery (or to a peaceful death) that he would perform unaided if he had the necessary strength, will or knowledge. And to do this in such a way as to help him gain independence as rapidly as possible". Henderson's accomplishments set her as one of the 20th century's most popular and influential nurses -
Ida V. Moffett
Moffett served as a mentor to more than 4,000 nurses. She was Director of Nursing for the Baptist Hospitals from 1941-1967 and Chief of Nursing from 1967-70. She developed a core curriculum for nursing students in cooperation with the University of Alabama and led the effort to establish the university degree in nursing at UAB. A former president of the State Board of Nursing, she developed the first licensed practical nursing program in Alabama. -
Dorothea Orem
Dorothea Elizabeth Orem was the founder of the Orem model of nursing, or Self Care Deficit Nursing Theory. Basically this theory states that nurses have to supply care when the patients cannot provide care to themselves. -
Hildegard Peplau
Hildegard E. Peplae is known as the "mother of psychiatric nursing". 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. Peplau's commitments to making a difference for the mentally ill will never be forgotten. -
Martha Rogers
Rogers' early nursing practice was in public health nursing in Michigan and in visiting nurse supervision, education, and practice in Connecticut. She is credited for establishing the Visiting Nurse Service of Phoenix, Arizona. She has published three books and over 200 articles. She lectured in 46 states, the District of Columbia, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Holland, China, Newfoundland, Columbia, and other countries. Rogers created the Science of Unitary Human Beings Model. -
Lillian Holland Harvey
Harvey served as Dean of the Tuskegee Institute University School of Nursing for nearly 30 years. Because of her undying efforts, the School of Nursing at Tuskegee became the first to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing in the state of Alabama. Dr. Harvey has fought for unrestricted professional recognition nationwide. She also battled difficult times of racial discrimination and segregation during the 1940's as a black female nurse. -
Mary Breckinridge
Mary Breckinridge started the Frontier Nursing Service in the Appalachian region of Kentucky, in order to provide health care to poor people who lived in rrural areas. Breckinridge also founded the first school in America that trained and certified midwifes. She was successful in making efforts to reduce the high infant and maternal mortality rates in pre World War II. -
Madeleine Leininger
Leininger was a pioneer nurse anthropologist. She was appointed dean of the University of Washington, School of Nursing in 1969. After a trip to New Guinea in the 1960%u2019s, she realized the need for nurses to understand their patients%u2019 culture and background in order to provide excellent care. She is recognized worldwide as the founder of transcultural nursing, a program that she created in 1974. -
Jean Watson
Jean Watson's research has been mainly in the area of human caring and loss. She created a theory of nursing that was published in 1979 in nursing: %u201CThe philosophy and science of caring%u201D . This theory set down strict views on the humanistic value of nursing.
