Florence Nightingale
1820 - 1910 (90 years)
Florence Nightingale was an English social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople. She gave nursing a favourable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making rounds of wounded soldiers at night.
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Cicely Saunders
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
Dame Cicely Mary Strode Saunders was an English nurse, social worker, physician and writer. She is noted for her work in terminal care research and her role in the birth of the hospice movement, emphasising the importance of palliative care in modern medicine, and opposing the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia.
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Callista Roy
1939 - Present (83 years)
Sister Callista Roy, CSJ is an American nun, nursing theorist, professor and author. She is known for creating the adaptation model of nursing. She was a nursing professor at Boston College before retiring in 2017. Roy was designated as a 2007 Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing.
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Virginia Henderson
1897 - 1996 (99 years)
Virginia Avenel Henderson was an American nurse, researcher, theorist, and author. Henderson is famous for a 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 that he would perform unaided if he had the necessary strength, will or knowledge" . She is known as "the first lady of nursing" and has been called, "arguably the most famous nurse of the 20th century" and "the quintessential nurse of the twentieth century". In a 1996 article in the Journal of Advanced Nursin...
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Madeleine Leininger
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Madeleine Leininger was a nursing theorist, nursing professor and developer of the concept of transcultural nursing. First published in 1961, her contributions to nursing theory involve the discussion of what it is to care.
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Hildegard Peplau
1909 - 1999 (90 years)
Hildegard E. Peplau was an American nurse and the first published nursing theorist since Florence Nightingale. She created the middle-range nursing theory of interpersonal relations, which helped to revolutionize the scholarly work of nurses. As a primary contributor to mental health law reform, she led the way towards humane treatment of patients with behavior and personality disorders.
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Lillian Wald
1867 - 1940 (73 years)
Lillian D. Wald was an American nurse, humanitarian and author. She was known for contributions to human rights and was the founder of American community nursing. She founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York City and was an early advocate to have nurses in public schools.
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Linda Richards
1841 - 1930 (89 years)
Linda Richards was the first professionally trained American nurse. She established nursing training programs in the United States and Japan, and created the first system for keeping individual medical records for hospitalized patients.
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Faye Glenn Abdellah
1919 - 2017 (98 years)
Faye Glenn Abdellah was an American pioneer in nursing research. Abdellah was the first nurse and woman to serve as the Deputy Surgeon General of the United States. Preceding her appointment, she served in active duty during the Korean War, where she earned a distinguished ranking equivalent to a Navy Rear Admiral, making her the highest ranked woman and nurse in the Federal Nursing Services at the time. In addition to these achievements, Abdellah led the formation of the National Institute of Nursing Research at the NIH, and was the founder and first dean of the Graduate School of Nursing at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences .
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Carl O. Helvie
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Carl O. Helvie was an American registered nurse and Professor Emeritus of Nursing at Old Dominion University. Helvie is known for his development and implementation of the Helvie Energy Theory of Nursing and Health.
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Patricia Benner
1942 - Present (80 years)
Patricia Sawyer Benner is a nursing theorist, academic and author. She is known for one of her books, From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice . Benner described the stages of learning and skill acquisition across the careers of nurses, applying the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition to nursing practice. Benner is a professor emerita at the University of California, San Francisco UCSF School of Nursing.
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Theodor Fliedner
1800 - 1864 (64 years)
Theodor Fliedner was a German Lutheran minister and founder of Lutheran deaconess training. In 1836, he founded Kaiserswerther Diakonie, a hospital and deaconess training center. Together with his wives Friederike Münster and Caroline Bertheau, he is regarded as the renewer of the apostolic deaconess ministry. His work in nursing was pioneering for Florence Nightingale, who spent a few months in Kaiserswerth in 1850.
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Florence Wald
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Florence Wald was an American nurse, former Dean of Yale School of Nursing, and largely credited as "the mother of the American hospice movement". She led the founding of Connecticut Hospice, the first hospice program in the United States. Late in life, Wald became interested in the provision of hospice care within prisons. In 1998, Wald was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
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Mary Seacole
1805 - 1881 (76 years)
Mary Jane Seacole was a British-Jamaican nurse and businesswoman who set up the "British Hotel" behind the lines during the Crimean War. She described the hotel as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers", and provided succour for wounded service men on the battlefield, nursing many of them back to health. Coming from a tradition of Jamaican and West African "doctresses", Seacole displayed "compassion, skills and bravery while nursing soldiers during the Crimean War", through the use of herbal remedies. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991.
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Vivian Bullwinkel
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Lieutenant Colonel Vivian Statham, was an Australian Army nurse during the Second World War. She was the sole surviving nurse of the Bangka Island Massacre, when the Japanese killed 21 of her fellow nurses on Radji Beach, Bangka Island, in the Dutch East Indies on 16 February 1942.
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Ellen Church
1904 - 1965 (61 years)
Ellen Church was the first female flight attendant. A trained nurse and pilot, Church wanted to pilot commercial aircraft, but those jobs were not open to women. Still wanting to fly, Church successfully worked to convince Boeing Air Transport that using nurses as flight-stewardesses would increase safety and help convince passengers that flying was safe. Their first flight took off on May 15, 1930.
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Dorothea Orem
1914 - 2007 (93 years)
Dorothea Elizabeth Orem , born in Baltimore, Maryland, was a nursing theorist and creator of the self-care deficit nursing theory, also known as the Orem model of nursing. Education Orem received a nursing diploma from Providence Hospital School of Nursing in Washington, DC. She also attended Catholic University of America, earning a Bachelor of Science in Nursing Education in 1939 and a Master of Science in Nursing Education in 1945.
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Mary Eliza Mahoney
1845 - 1926 (81 years)
Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African-American to study and work as a professionally trained nurse in the United States. In 1879, Mahoney was the first African American to graduate from an American school of nursing.
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Martha E. Rogers
1914 - 1994 (80 years)
Martha Elizabeth Rogers was an American nurse, researcher, theorist, and author. While professor of nursing at New York University, Rogers developed the "Science of Unitary Human Beings", a body of ideas that she described in her book An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing.
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Marjory Gordon
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Marjory Gordon was a nursing theorist and professor who created a nursing assessment theory known as Gordon's functional health patterns. Gordon served in 1973 as the first president of the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association until 1988. She was a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing beginning in 1977 and was designated a Living Legend by the same organization in 2009.
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Jean Watson
1940 - Present (82 years)
Jean Watson is an American nurse theorist and nursing professor who is best known for her theory of human caring. She is the author of numerous texts, including Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring. Watson's research on caring has been incorporated into education and patient care at hundreds of nursing schools and healthcare facilities across the world.
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Ethel Gordon Fenwick
1857 - 1947 (90 years)
Ethel Gordon Fenwick was a British nurse who played a major role in the History of Nursing in the United Kingdom. She campaigned to procure a nationally recognised certificate for nursing, to safeguard the title "Nurse", and lobbied Parliament to pass a law to control nursing and limit it to "registered" nurses only.
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Catherine Wilson
1822 - 1862 (40 years)
Catherine Wilson was a British murderer who was hanged for one murder, but was generally thought at the time to have committed six others. She worked as a nurse and poisoned her victims after encouraging them to leave her money in their willss. She was described privately by the sentencing judge as "the greatest criminal that ever lived".
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Clara Barton
1821 - 1912 (91 years)
Clarissa Harlowe Barton was an American nurse who founded the American Red Cross. She was a hospital nurse in the American Civil War, a teacher, and a patent clerk. Since nursing education was not then very formalized and she did not attend nursing school, she provided self-taught nursing care. Barton is noteworthy for doing humanitarian work and civil rights advocacy at a time before women had the right to vote. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973.
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Lystra Gretter
1858 - 1951 (93 years)
Lystra Eggert was born in September 1858 in Bayfield, Ontario. She attended grade school in the Bayfield area until 1866 when her family moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. It was here that Lystra began attending private schools. When she was finished with school, at the age of 19, she married a man by the name of John Birney Gretter, where she then took the name, Lystra Gretter. Her husband, John, was approximately twenty six years older and a veteran of the Confederate Army led by Robert E. Lee. In the year 1881, Lystra and John welcomed their first and only daughter, Mary.
Go to Profile Alison Joan Tierney is a British nursing theorist, nurse researcher and former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Advanced Nursing. Tierney was one of the first graduates of the Integrated Degree/Nursing programme at The University of Edinburgh. In 2018 she was named as one of 70 of the most influential nurses in the 70 years of the NHS .
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Katharine Kolcaba
1944 - Present (78 years)
Katharine Kolcaba is an American nursing theorist and nursing professor. Dr. Kolcaba is responsible for the Theory of Comfort, a broad-scope mid-range nursing theory commonly implemented throughout the nursing field up to the institutional level.
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Ōyama Sutematsu
1860 - 1919 (59 years)
Princess Ōyama Sutematsu, born Yamakawa Sakiko, was a prominent figure in the Meiji era, and the first Japanese woman to receive a college degree. She was born into a traditional samurai household which supported the Tokugawa shogunate during the Boshin War. As a child, she survived the monthlong siege known as the Battle of Aizu in 1868, and lived briefly as a refugee.
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Edith Cavell
1865 - 1915 (50 years)
Edith Louisa Cavell was a British nurse. She is celebrated for saving the lives of soldiers from both sides without discrimination and for helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium during the First World War, for which she was arrested. She was accused of treason, found guilty by a court-martial and sentenced to death. Despite international pressure for mercy, she was shot by a German firing squad. Her execution received worldwide condemnation and extensive press coverage.
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Rachel Robinson
1922 - Present (100 years)
Rachel Robinson is an American former professor and registered nurse, as well as the widow of professional baseball player Jackie Robinson. Life and work She was born in New York City and attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she met Robinson in 1941 prior to his leaving UCLA when his baseball eligibility ran out. She graduated from UCLA June 1, 1945, with a bachelor's degree in nursing. Rachel and Robinson married on February 10, 1946, the year before he broke into the big leagues. They had three children: Jackie, Jr. , Sharon , and David .
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Dorothea Dix
1802 - 1887 (85 years)
Dorothea Lynde Dix was an American advocate on behalf of the indigent mentally ill who, through a vigorous and sustained program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums. During the Civil War, she served as a Superintendent of Army Nurses.
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Mary Adelaide Nutting
1858 - 1948 (90 years)
Mary Adelaide Nutting was a Canadian nurse, educator, and pioneer in the field of hospital care. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University's first nurse training program in 1891, Nutting helped to found a modern nursing program at the school. In 1907, she became involved in an experimental program at the new Teachers College at Columbia University. Ascending to the role of chair of the nursing and health department, Nutting authored a vanguard curriculum based on preparatory nursing education, public health studies, and social service emphasis. She served as president of a variety of cou...
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Mary Carson Breckinridge
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Mary Carson Breckinridge was an American nurse midwife and the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service , which provided comprehensive family medical care to the mountain people of rural Kentucky. FNS served remote and impoverished areas off the road and rail system but accessible by horseback. She modeled her services on European practices and sought to professionalize American nurse-midwives to practice autonomously in homes and decentralized clinics. Although Breckinridge's work demonstrated efficacy by dramatically reducing infant and maternal mortality in Appalachia, at a comparatively lo...
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Erna Beilhardt
1907 - Present (115 years)
Erna Beilhardt was a German female guard at several nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. A member of the SS-Aufseherin, or overseer, Beilhardt was also a nurse affiliated with the German Red Cross during the last year of World War II.
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Annie Warburton Goodrich
1866 - 1954 (88 years)
Annie Warburton Goodrich was an American nurse and academic. She was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. Her grandfather was John S. Butler. She entered the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses in 1890 and graduated in 1892 then worked there after she graduated before working at St. Luke's Hospital. In 1902, she became Superintendent of Nursing at New York Hospital and in 1907, General Superintendent at Bellevue Hospital. She was an assistant professor of hospital economics in the Teacher's College at Columbia University from 1904. By 1917 she w...
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James Derham
1762 - Present (260 years)
James Durham , also known as James Durham, was the first African American to formally practice medicine in the United States, though he never received an M.D. degree. Biography James Derham was born into slavery in Philadelphia in 1762. As a child, Derham was transferred to Dr. John Kearsley Jr. under whom Derham studied medicine. From Dr. Kearsley, Derham learned about compound medicine with a focus on curing illnesses of the throat, as well as patient bedside manner. Upon Dr. Kearsley's death, Derham, then fifteen years old, was moved between several different masters before finally settling with Dr.
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Charles Cullen
1960 - Present (62 years)
Charles Edmund Cullen is an American serial killer who confessed to murdering up to 40 patients during the course of his 16-year career as a nurse in New Jersey. However, in subsequent interviews with police, psychiatrists, and journalists, it became apparent that he had killed many more, whom he could not specifically remember by name, though he could often remember details of their murders. Experts have estimated that Cullen may ultimately be responsible for 400 deaths, which would make him the most prolific serial killer in recorded history. He has only 29 confirmed victims.
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Lucile Randon
1904 - Present (118 years)
Lucile Randon , also known as Sister André, is a French supercentenarian and nun, who at the age of , is the world's second-oldest verified living person, behind Kane Tanaka. She additionally holds the titles of fourth-oldest verified person, second-oldest French person, and the second-oldest verified person in Europe. Randon was born to a non religious protestant family, but converted to Catholicism as a young adult. She worked as a governess, teacher, and missionary before retiring at the age of 75. She currently resides in a nursing home at Toulon, France. In addition to her longevity, she...
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Clara Maass
1876 - 1901 (25 years)
Clara Louise Maass was an American nurse who died as a result of volunteering for medical experiments to study yellow fever. Early life Clara Maass was born in East Orange, New Jersey, to German immigrants Hedwig and Robert Maass. She was the oldest of nine children in a devout Lutheran family. Clara's family was impoverished and to help alleviate the financial burden of one child on her family, she went to work as a "mother's helper" for a local woman while in elementary school. She did not generate any income, but was able to live and eat with her employer's family.
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Patricia Flatley Brennan
1953 - Present (69 years)
Patricia Flatley Brennan is the director of the National Library of Medicine. Prior to that, she was the Lillian L. Moehlman Bascom Professor, School of Nursing and College of Engineering, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Brennan received a master of science in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She served as chair of University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Engineering's Department of Industrial Engineering from 2007 to 2010.
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Nella Larsen
1891 - 1964 (73 years)
Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen was an American novelist. Working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels, Quicksand and Passing , and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries.
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Isabel Hampton Robb
1860 - 1910 (50 years)
Isabel Adams Hampton Robb was an American nurse theorist, author, nursing school administrator and early leader. Hampton was the first Superintendent of Nurses at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, wrote several influential textbooks, and helped to found the organizations that became known as the National League for Nursing, the International Council of Nurses, and the American Nurses Association. Hampton also played a large role in advancing the social status of nursing through her work in developing a curriculum of more advanced training during her time at the Johns Hopkins School of Nurs...
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Evelyn Mase
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Evelyn Ntoko Mase , later named Evelyn Rakeepile, was a South African nurse. She was the first wife of the anti-apartheid activist and the future president Nelson Mandela, to whom she was married from 1944 to 1958.
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Princess Alice of the United Kingdom
1843 - 1878 (35 years)
Princess Alice of the United Kingdom was Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhine from 13 June 1877 until her death in 1878 as the wife of Grand Duke Louis IV. She was the third child and second daughter of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Alice was the first of Queen Victoria's nine children to die, and one of three to be outlived by their mother, who died in 1901. Her life had been enwrapped in tragedy since her father's death in 1861.
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Hanna Helena Chrzanowska
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Hanna Helena Chrzanowska was a Polish Roman Catholic who served as a nurse and was also a professed member of the Benedictine oblates. Chrzanowska worked in her profession during World War II when the Nazi regime targeted Poles but she tended to the wounded and the ailing throughout the conflict and sought to minimize suffering in her own parish. Chrzanowska was awarded two prestigious Polish awards for her good works and died in 1973 after an almost decade-long bout with cancer.
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Marie Manthey
1935 - Present (87 years)
Marie Schuber Manthey is an American nurse, author, and entrepreneur. She is recognized as one of the originators of Primary Nursing, an innovative system of nursing care delivery. Manthey was named a Living Legend of the American Academy of Nursing in 2015. The Living Legends designation honors individuals with "extraordinary contributions to the nursing profession, sustained over the course of their careers."
Go to Profile The ancient Egyptian noble Sitre In was buried in the Valley of the Kings, in tomb KV60. She has been identified as the nurse of Hatshepsut. A life-sized statue of her holding Hatshepsut is inscribed with her charge, which is repeated on an ostrakon now in Vienna. Although not a member of the royal family, she received the honour of a burial in the royal necropolis. Her coffin has the inscription wr šdt nfrw nswt In, identifying her as the Great Royal Wet Nurse In.
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Loretta Ford
1920 - Present (102 years)
Loretta C. Ford is an American nurse and the co-founder of the first nurse practitioner program. Along with pediatrician Henry Silver, Ford started the pediatric nurse practitioner program at the University of Colorado in 1965. In 1972, Ford joined the University of Rochester as founding dean of the nursing school.
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Lauren Underwood
1986 - Present (36 years)
Lauren Ashley Underwood is an American politician and registered nurse who is a U.S. representative from Illinois's 14th congressional district as a member of the Democratic Party. Her district, once represented by former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, includes the outer western suburbs of Chicago, including Crystal Lake, Geneva, Oswego, Woodstock, and Yorkville.
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Mary, Princess Royal and Countess of Harewood
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Mary, Princess Royal and Countess of Harewood , was the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. She was the sister of Kings Edward VIII and George VI, and aunt of the current British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. In the First World War, she performed charity work in support of servicemen and their families. She married Henry Lascelles, Viscount Lascelles , in 1922. Mary was given the title of Princess Royal in 1932. During the Second World War, she was Controller Commandant of the Auxiliary Territorial Service. The Princess Royal and the Earl of Harewood had two sons, George Lascelles, 7...
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