The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Nursing,
#201
Estelle Massey Osborne
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Estelle Massey Riddle Osborne was an African American nurse and educator. She served in many prominent positions and worked to eliminate racial discrimination in the nursing field. Early life and education Estelle Massey was born in Palestine, Texas in 1901, the eighth of eleven children. Despite being uneducated and working in menial jobs, her parents, Hall and Bettye Estelle Massey, sent all of their children to college.
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May Shiga Hornback
1924 - 1976 (52 years)
May Shiga Hornback was an American nurse and nursing educator at the University of Wisconsin for twenty years . She was a pioneer in the use of technology to deliver nursing instruction. Life and career May Shiga was born on May 4, 1924, in Seattle. A nisei, she was the daughter and youngest of five children of Japanese immigrants Henry Juro Shiga, the owner of a knit garments factory, and Sumi Hirano Shiga. She graduated from Garfield High School in 1941 and began studying nursing at Seattle University. After the US began its war with Japan, Shiga's father was incarcerated at the Fort Li...
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Elizabeth Bixler Torrey
1899 - 1976 (77 years)
Elizabeth Bixler Torrey was an American nurse who spent much of her career working to improve accreditation standards for American schools of nursing. Biography On October 29, 1899 Elizabeth Seelye Bixler was born to Mabel Seelye Bixler and James Wilson Bixler in New London, Connecticut.
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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 significantly reduced death rates by improving hygiene and living standards. Nightingale 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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Virginia Henderson
1897 - 1996 (99 years)
Virginia Avenel Henderson was an American nurse, researcher, theorist, and writer. 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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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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Lillian Wald
1867 - 1940 (73 years)
Lillian D. Wald was an American nurse, humanitarian and author. She strove for human rights and started American community nursing. She founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York City and was an early advocate for nurses in public schools.
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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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Anna Maxwell
1851 - 1929 (78 years)
Anna Caroline Maxwell , was a nurse who came to be known as "the American Florence Nightingale". Her pioneering activities were crucial to the growth of professional nursing in the United States. Early years Maxwell was born in Bristol, New York on March 14, 1851. Her father was a Scottish emigrant, clergyman John Eglinton Maxwell, and her mother was an American-born woman of English descent, Diantha Caroline Maxwell. The family moved to Canada for some of Maxwell's childhood, returning in 1874. That year, she began nursing without formal training, as an assistant matron at New England Hospital.
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Louise McManus
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
Louise McManus was the first nurse to earn a Ph.D. She established schools of nursing in college and helped to develop nationally standardized methods for nursing licensure in the United States. Education Louise McManus earned her nursing degree at the Massachusetts General Hospital School of Nursing in 1921. She completed bachelor's , master's and doctoral degrees at Columbia University's Teachers College, where she earned a PhD in educational research, becoming the first nurse to acquire a PhD.
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M. Elizabeth Shellabarger
1879 - 1967 (88 years)
Mary Elizabeth Shellabarger was a Registered Nurse, army nurse overseas during World War I, and director of American Red Cross Nursing Service in Albania and Montenegro. Early life M. Elizabeth Shellabarger was born in Moffat, Colorado, on October 16, 1879, the daughter of Adam Shellabarger and Abigal "Abbie" Wales, Colorado pioneers. The other children were: Charles Walter , Ralph Wales , Emma Irene , Clara Ethel "Dolly" , Gertrude Eloise .
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Florence Blake
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Florence Guinness Blake was an American nurse, professor and writer who made significant contributions to pediatric nursing and to family-centered nursing care. Blake wrote her classic text, The Child, His Parents and the Nurse, in 1954. She co-authored two other pediatric nursing textbooks, Essentials of Pediatric Nursing and Nursing Care of Children. She was on the nursing faculty at several American universities. She was posthumously honored with induction into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame.
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Louie Croft Boyd
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
Louie Croft Boyd was an American nurse, hospital superintendent of nurses, nursing instructor, and writer. As a lobbyist for the newly formed Colorado State Trained Nurses Association, she advocated for legislation to regulate the licensing of nurses in Colorado. Upon passage of the bill in 1905, she applied for and became the first licensed nurse in the state. She was posthumously inducted into the Colorado Nurses Association Hall of Fame and the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 2004.
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Alma Elizabeth Gault
1891 - 1981 (90 years)
Alma Elizabeth Gault was an American nurse administrator. Gault successfully advocated for African American nurses and their educational institutions to be integrated into professional nursing associations. Under her leadership, Meharry Medical College School of Nursing, in Nashville, Tennessee, was the first segregated black nursing school to attain membership in the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Nursing. For her achievement's Gault was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1984.
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Elsie Stephenson
1916 - 1967 (51 years)
Elsie Stephenson was the first Director of the Nursing Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh, which was founded in 1956 as the first university department of Nursing in the UK. Early life Stephenson was the daughter of a farmer, Henry Walker Stephenson, and Ethel Watson, and was born at Crawleas Farm, Merrington, in Bishop Auckland, County Durham. Her father's death in 1919 in the influenza epidemic has been cited as her motivation for becoming a nurse.
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Martha M. Russell
1867 - 1961 (94 years)
Martha Montague Russell was an American nurse in World War I. She was one of the first six American nurses to receive the Florence Nightingale Medal when it was awarded by the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1920.
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Hulda Margaret Lyttle
1889 - 1983 (94 years)
Hulda Margaret Lyttle Frazier was an American nurse educator and hospital administrator who spent most of her career in Nashville, Tennessee at Meharry Medical College School of Nursing and affiliated Hubbard Hospital. Lyttle advocated for the modernization and professionalization of African American nurses' training programs, and improved practice standards in hospitals that served African Americans.
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Mary Seacole
1805 - 1881 (76 years)
Mary Jane Seacole was a British nurse and businesswoman. Seacole was born to a Creole mother who ran a boarding house and had herbalist skills as a "doctress". In 1990, Seacole was awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit. In 2004, she was voted the greatest black Briton in a survey conducted in 2003 by the black heritage website Every Generation.
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Anna D. Wolf
1890 - 1985 (95 years)
Anna Dryden Wolf was an American nurse who served as the first dean of the Peking Union Medical College School of Nursing in Beijing, China, and later as the director of the school of nursing and nursing services at Johns Hopkins University. Her dedication to higher-level nursing education has been credited with laying the groundwork for the foundation of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in 1984.
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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 ...
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Margaret Arnstein
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Margaret G. Arnstein was an American health expert who focused her efforts in nursing and public health. Throughout her life Arnstein worked for the United States public health sector and several American colleges, eventually becoming dean of the Yale School of Nursing in 1967. Arnstein also published multiple academic papers discussing nursing practices within the U.S health system of the time. Arnstein also participated in Congress discussions in relation to provisions given to the health sector by the state through the Second Supplemental Appropriation Bill of 1957. In her later career Mar...
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Patricia M. Davidson
Patricia M. Davidson is an Australian nursing educator and Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Wollongong. She is best known for her contributions improving cardiac nursing and transitional care with a focus on under served populations in a global context, and for her leadership in higher education.
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Ernestine Wiedenbach
1900 - 1998 (98 years)
Ernestine Wiedenbach was a nursing theorist. Her family emigrated to New York in 1909, where she later received a B.A. from Wellesley College in 1922, an R.N. from Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in 1925, an M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1934, and a certificate in nurse-midwifery from the Maternity Center Association School for Nurse-Midwives in New York in 1946.
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Bertha Harmer
1885 - 1934 (49 years)
Bertha Harmer was a Canadian nurse, writer and educator, known for writing the textbook Textbook of the Principles and Practice of Nursing. Harmer was born in Port Hope, Ontario, the daughter of a railway carpenter. After finishing high school and working for several years, she earned a nursing degree from the Toronto General Hospital in 1913, and a bachelor's degree in administration and teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City in 1915.
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