One article on each of sixty-five nurses: the people who built the profession and its institutions, the ones who worked out what it knows, the ones who forced it open to people it excluded, the ones who nursed through the wars and epidemics, and a few who are famous for something else entirely.
Who built the profession
| Nurse | Known for |
|---|---|
| Rufaida Al-Aslamia | Ran a mobile care tent in seventh-century Medina and trained other women to do it, twelve centuries before Nightingale |
| Florence Nightingale | Took thirty-eight volunteers to the Crimea in 1854, came home with the mortality statistics, and turned nursing into a trained profession |
| Ethel Gordon Fenwick | Fought Nightingale for thirty years over whether nurses should be registered by law, won, and holds registration number one |
| Linda Richards | America's first trained nurse; invented the individual patient record, then spent thirty years founding nursing schools |
| Mary Eliza Mahoney | Scrubbed floors at a Boston hospital for fifteen years, then graduated from its school in 1879 as America's first Black trained nurse |
| Isabel Hampton Robb | Built the Johns Hopkins school, the bodies that became the ANA and the NLN, and the American Journal of Nursing |
| Adelaide Nutting | Proved with data that student nurses were being worked as free labour, then became the first nurse to hold a university chair |
| Lavinia Dock | Wrote the first drug manual for nurses in 1890, and was arrested picketing the White House in her sixties |
| Annie Goodrich | Founding dean at Yale in 1923 — the first nursing school with its own dean, budget and degree, owned by no hospital |
| Anna Caroline Maxwell | Took nurses into a typhoid camp in 1898; the death rate fell so sharply that Congress created the Army Nurse Corps |
| Mildred Montag | Designed the two-year associate degree as a subordinate technical role; it became a main route to the RN licence instead |
| Lillian Wald | Invented public health nursing and the term itself; put the first nurse in a public school |
| Mary Breckinridge | Brought nurse-midwifery to the United States on horseback, across a thousand square miles of eastern Kentucky |
| Alice Magaw | Gave 14,000 anesthetics for the Mayo brothers without a death, and published the numbers |
| Agatha Hodgins | Opened the first American school of anesthesia in 1915 and founded the organization that certified nurse anesthetists |
Who worked out what nursing knows
| Nurse | Known for |
|---|---|
| Florence Guinness Blake | Made pediatric nursing a graduate specialty and got parents admitted to the children's ward |
| Virginia Henderson | Wrote the definition of nursing the profession still uses, in one sentence, in 1960 |
| Hildegard Peplau | Argued that the nurse–patient relationship is itself the treatment, and founded psychiatric nursing on it |
| Ida Jean Orlando | Recorded 2,000 real encounters, found nurses acting on unchecked assumptions, and produced the nursing process |
| Faye Glenn Abdellah | Reorganised nursing around the patient's problems rather than the doctor's diagnosis; first nurse Deputy Surgeon General |
| Martha Rogers | Insisted nursing was a science with its own subject matter, and spent thirty years making the profession act like it |
| Dorothea Orem | Answered the question of when a person actually needs a nurse: when they cannot meet their own self-care demand |
| Imogene King | Care works when nurse and patient agree the goal; most failures are because they never did |
| Callista Roy | The adaptation model, and the rule that you have not assessed a patient until you know what the illness did to their life |
| Betty Neuman | Lines of defence and resistance, and the model that put prevention inside nursing rather than beside it |
| Madeleine Leininger | Took a doctorate in anthropology to explain something she saw on a children's ward, and created transcultural nursing |
| Jean Watson | Argued that caring is nursing's actual subject, not the soft part around the clinical work |
| Patricia Benner | Showed that expert nurses stop using rules and read situations whole — and often cannot say how |
| Loretta Ford | Created the nurse practitioner role in 1965, over the objections of both professions |
| Cicely Saunders | Nurse, then almoner, then doctor, because nobody would take the argument from a nurse; founded the modern hospice |
| Florence Wald | Resigned the deanship at Yale to study dying, and opened the first hospice in the United States |
Who forced the profession open
| Nurse | Known for |
|---|---|
| Martha Minerva Franklin | Wrote to every Black nurse in America she could find, one letter at a time, and turned the replies into an organization |
| Adah Belle Thoms | Ran a New York nursing school for seventeen years without the title, and got the first Black nurses into the Army |
| Estelle Massey Osborne | First Black nurse with a master's degree; used a wartime post to open twenty nursing schools to Black students |
| Mabel Keaton Staupers | Broke the Army Nurse Corps quota on Black nurses in January 1945, then closed down her own organization |
| Betty Smith Williams | Founded the National Black Nurses Association in 1971, twenty years after the last one had dissolved itself |
| Hazel Johnson-Brown | Refused a nursing school place for being Black; became the first Black woman general in the US Army |
| Luther Christman | Barred from programmes, from a maternity rotation and from the Army for being a man; became the first male nursing dean |
| Ildaura Murillo-Rohde | Founded the National Association of Hispanic Nurses over a mismatch between the patients and the workforce |
| Eddie Bernice Johnson | Left Texas to train because no school there would take her, and became the first nurse elected to Congress |
War and epidemic
| Nurse | Known for |
|---|---|
| Dorothea Dix | Founded thirty-two mental hospitals, then recruited 3,000 women as the Union's Superintendent of Army Nurses |
| Clara Barton | Never trained as a nurse, ran supplies onto Civil War battlefields anyway, and founded the American Red Cross |
| Mary Ann Bickerdyke | Set up 300 field hospitals; Sherman said of her, "She outranks me. I can't do a thing in the world" |
| Sally Tompkins | Ran the Civil War hospital with the lowest death rate on either side; commissioned a captain so it could stay open |
| Susie King Taylor | Born enslaved, nursed a Union regiment for four years unpaid, and wrote the only memoir of its kind |
| Harriet Tubman | Nursed dysentery and smallpox in the Union camps and ran a ward at Fort Monroe; never paid for any of it |
| Walt Whitman | Three years in the Washington war hospitals, and the most honest account of bedside work in American literature |
| Louisa May Alcott | Six weeks nursing in Georgetown, then typhoid and a lifetime of mercury poisoning from the cure |
| Mary Seacole | Refused by the War Office and by Nightingale's corps, so she paid her own passage to the Crimea and went anyway |
| Clara Maass | Volunteered to be bitten by infected mosquitoes to help prove how yellow fever spreads, and died of it at 25 |
| Edith Cavell | Built professional nursing in Belgium, moved 200 soldiers out of occupied Brussels, and was shot for it in 1915 |
| Julia Stimson | Ran American Army nursing in the First World War and won its nurses rank; first woman major in the US Army |
| Lenah Higbee | One of the first twenty women in the US Navy, and the first woman awarded the Navy Cross |
| Sister Elizabeth Kenny | Untrained bush nurse who spent twenty years telling doctors their polio treatment was crippling children, and won |
| Vivian Bullwinkel | Sole survivor when twenty-two Australian army nurses were machine-gunned in the sea in 1942, and lived to testify |
| Margie Oppenheimer | Nursed in the Riga ghetto with nothing to treat anyone with, survived five camps, then twenty-nine years as an LPN |
| Nellie Wade | Cadet Nurse Corps trainee who delivered a thousand babies in one Florida town and was still working at 92 |
| Edith Shain | Psychiatric nurse whose claim to be the woman in the 1945 Times Square photograph is probably wrong |
| Sharon Ann Lane | Asked to stay on the Vietnamese ward at Chu Lai; the only US servicewoman killed by enemy fire in Vietnam |
Known for something else
| Nurse | Known for |
|---|---|
| Alberta Hunter | Blues star who forged her papers, trained as a practical nurse at 61, and worked twenty years on a New York ward |
| Agatha Christie | 3,400 hours on the wards and a dispensing qualification, which is where the poisons in eighty novels came from |
| Amelia Earhart | Nursed wounded airmen and influenza patients in Toronto in 1918; it is what put her next to an aerodrome |
| Margaret Sanger | Visiting nurse in the tenements who founded Planned Parenthood, and spent decades attached to the eugenics movement |
| Anita Perry | Seventeen years as a nurse and a director of nursing, then fourteen as first lady of Texas |
| Naomi Judd | Intensive care nurse before the music, and the hepatitis C she caught on the unit is what ended it |