Virginia Henderson wrote the sentence the profession still uses to say what a nurse is for. It was published in 1960, it is one sentence long, and its most radical clause is at the end.
Training
Henderson was born on November 30, 1897 in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Virginia. She entered the Army School of Nursing in Washington in 1918, drawn by the wounded coming back from France, and graduated in 1921.
She spent two years at the Henry Street Settlement doing the public health nursing Lillian Wald had built there, then became the first full-time nursing instructor in Virginia, at Norfolk Presbyterian Hospital, from 1924 to 1929. She took a bachelor's degree and then a master's at Teachers College, Columbia, in 1934, and taught there until 1948.
The definition
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 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.
Three things in it were not obvious at the time and are worth noticing now.
It says sick or well — nursing is not confined to illness. It says or to peaceful death, which puts dying inside the job rather than outside it as a failure, twenty years before the hospice movement reached the United States. And it ends by defining success as the patient not needing you, which makes nursing the only clinical profession whose stated aim is its own redundancy.
Underneath it Henderson set out fourteen components of basic nursing care, running from breathing, eating and elimination through sleep, clothing and communication to worship, work, play and learning. The list deliberately mixes the physiological with the ordinary, because her argument was that a nurse substitutes for whatever the patient temporarily cannot do, and that includes wanting to.
The books
Henderson revised Bertha Harmer's Textbook of the Principles and Practice of Nursing through several editions and became its senior author, which is how the definition reached every American nursing student. Basic Principles of Nursing Care, written for the International Council of Nurses in 1960, carried it worldwide; it has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
She was a research associate at the Yale School of Nursing from 1953, where she spent twelve years compiling the Nursing Studies Index, a four-volume annotated bibliography of sixty years of English-language nursing research. Nobody had indexed the field before. Doing it revealed how little of what nurses did had ever been studied, which was part of the point.
Later
Henderson kept an office at Yale as research associate emerita until she was well into her nineties, and lectured internationally into her eighties.
She was called the first lady of nursing and, by the American Nurses Association, the most influential nurse of the twentieth century. She received the first Christiane Reimann Prize, nursing's largest international award, in 1985, was made an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Nursing, and took honorary doctorates from thirteen universities.
She died on March 19, 1996 in Branford, Connecticut, at 98.
Related
- Nursing theory
- The nursing process
- Nursing diagnosis and standardized language
- Hildegard Peplau
- Lillian Wald
Sources
- Virginia Henderson, for the chronology, the definition and her honors. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Basic Principles of Nursing Care, Virginia Henderson. International Council of Nurses, 1960. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Virginia Henderson Global Nursing e-Repository, named for her. Sigma Theta Tau International. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- ANA Hall of Fame inductees. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.