Isabel Hampton Robb: The Woman Who Built Nursing's Institutions

Almost every institution American nursing still runs on was built or co-founded by Isabel Hampton Robb in a working life of about twenty years.

Bellevue and Chicago

Isabel Hampton Robb

She was born Isabel Adams Hampton on August 26, 1859 in Welland, Ontario, taught school for several years, and came to New York to train at the Bellevue Hospital Training School, graduating in 1883. After two years at St Paul's House in Rome she returned to become superintendent of the Illinois Training School for Nurses at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in 1886.

Chicago is where she started reforming things. She graded the course, required students to demonstrate competence rather than simply serve time, and — the significant one — negotiated with outside hospitals to send her students there on rotation, so that a nurse's education stopped depending entirely on whatever cases her own hospital happened to admit. That is the origin of the clinical rotation.

Johns Hopkins

In 1889 Johns Hopkins recruited her as superintendent of nurses and principal of its new training school.

She extended the course from two years to three. She cut the working day to eight hours at a time when twelve was normal and student nurses were unpaid hospital labour. She abolished the student stipend, on the argument that as long as nurses were paid a wage they would be treated as employees, and that education had to be a course of study rather than a job.

Nursing schools of the period existed largely to staff their hospitals cheaply. Robb's changes attacked that directly, and set the pattern American nursing education followed for the next fifty years.

She hired Lavinia Dock and taught Adelaide Nutting, both of whom became major figures in their own right. She resigned in 1894 on marrying Dr Hunter Robb, since married women were not permitted to hold the post.

The organizations

Retirement from the ward did not slow her down.

In 1893 she and Dock founded the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses — the body Linda Richards first presided over, and which became the National League for Nursing.
In 1896 she founded the Nurses' Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada and was its first president. It became the American Nurses Association.
In 1900 she helped launch the American Journal of Nursing, the profession's first journal owned and run by nurses, and organized the stock subscription that paid for it.
She pushed for state registration laws, which is where nurse practice acts and boards of nursing come from, and for university-level nursing education, which arrived at Teachers College in 1899.

Her books did the same work on paper: Nursing: Its Principles and Practice (1893), Nursing Ethics (1900) — the first American textbook on the subject — and Educational Standards for Nurses (1907).

Cleveland

Robb was killed on April 15, 1910 in Cleveland, struck by a streetcar as she stepped into the road to avoid an automobile. She was 50.

She was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1976, among its first group.

Sources

Isabel Hampton Robb, for the chronology, the Hopkins reforms and the organizations she founded. Accessed September 9, 2026.
Nursing Ethics: For Hospital and Private Use, Isabel Hampton Robb, 1900. Accessed September 9, 2026.
History of the National League for Nursing. Accessed September 9, 2026.
ANA Hall of Fame inductees. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.