Linda Richards: America's First Trained Nurse

Linda Richards was the first professionally trained nurse in the United States — literally, she held diploma number one. She is also the reason hospitals keep a chart on every patient.

Linda Richards (1841-1930) Linda Richards (1841–1930)

Before there was training

Richards was born on July 27, 1841 in West Potsdam, New York. She nursed her mother through a fatal illness as a girl, and later her fiancé, George Poole, who was severely wounded in the last year of the Civil War and died of it in 1869. She had studied for a year to be a teacher. What she took from those two long illnesses was that she wanted to nurse, and that nobody in the country could teach her how.

Her first job, at Boston City Hospital — now part of Boston Medical Center — showed her what that meant in practice. Assistant nurses were unpaid labor with no instruction whatsoever. She lasted three months.

Diploma number one

In 1872 the New England Hospital for Women and Children, an institution run by and for women, opened the first American nurse training program on the model Florence Nightingale had built in London. Its medical head was Dr. Susan Dimock, and the school is now the Dimock Center.

Richards was the first person to enroll, and when she graduated a year later, in 1873, hers was the first nursing diploma issued in the United States.

Six years after her, at the same school, Mary Eliza Mahoney became the first Black woman in the country to complete a nursing program. Mahoney had been working in that building as a cook and washerwoman for most of the time Richards was training in it.

The patient record

She went straight to New York as night supervisor at Bellevue Hospital, which had just opened a training school of its own.

Bellevue is where she made her most durable contribution. Nurses at the time carried what they knew about a patient in their heads and handed it over verbally at shift change. Richards worked out a system of written notes kept for each individual patient, so the record stayed with the patient rather than with whoever happened to be on duty. Hospitals across the United States adopted it, and so did British ones. Every chart, every handoff sheet and every electronic health record in use today descends from it.

Building the schools

In 1874 she returned to Boston as superintendent of the Boston Training School for Nurses, now part of Massachusetts General Hospital. The school was failing and close to being shut down. She rebuilt the program and it became one of the best in the country.

In 1877 she spent seven months in England on an intensive course, met Florence Nightingale, and trained as a resident visitor at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, St Thomas' Hospital and King's College Hospital in London. She came home and spent the next three decades founding and running training schools.

In 1885 she went to Japan and set up that country's first nurse training program, supervising the school at the Doshisha Hospital in Kyoto for five years.

Psychiatric nursing and leadership

Returning to the United States in 1890, she spent the next twenty years working in and helping establish institutions for the mentally ill — an area of nursing almost nobody was training for, and one Hildegard Peplau would finally give a theory and a graduate program sixty years later — while taking on the profession's first leadership roles.

She was elected the first president of the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools, founded by Isabel Hampton Robb and Lavinia Dock, which became the National League for Nursing. She also headed the Philadelphia Visiting Nurses Society, now the Visiting Nurse Association of Greater Philadelphia.

She retired in 1911, at seventy, and wrote Reminiscences of Linda Richards about it all. A stroke in 1923 left her hospitalized until her death on April 16, 1930.

Richards was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1976 and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1994.

Sources

Reminiscences of Linda Richards, Linda Richards, 1911. Accessed September 9, 2026.
ANA Hall of Fame inductees. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.
History of the National League for Nursing. Accessed September 9, 2026.
Linda Richards, for the chronology of her training, posts and travels. Accessed September 9, 2026.
The Dimock Center history, on the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Accessed September 9, 2026.

Linda Richards