10 Of The Most Influential Nurses In History

These 10 nurses changed the course of the profession by breaking racial barriers, reshaping healthcare, and founding institutions that outlived them. Some are known worldwide, others worked locally, and several carried real contradictions worth naming. More than 85% of U.S. nurses today are women, and this list, ordered alphabetically and nowhere near exhaustive, traces part of where that workforce came from.

Clara Barton

Clara Barton (1821-1912) had no formal nursing training but became one of the most famous nurses in U.S. history. An abolitionist and suffrage advocate, she began caring for wounded Civil War soldiers as they flooded makeshift hospitals, then joined the Army to treat them at the front. After the war she traveled to Europe, learned about the International Red Cross, and returned home to found the American Red Cross. That organization has its own record to reckon with: it refused to accept blood from Black donors during drives until 1942.

Goldie D. Brangman

Goldie D. Brangman (1917-2020) was a nurse anesthetist, cofounder of the School of Nurse Anesthesia at Harlem Hospital in 1951, and the first African American president of the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists. She was part of the surgical team that operated on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after the 1958 assassination attempt, manually pumping his breathing bag.

Mary Breckinridge

Mary Breckinridge (1881-1965) was born to wealth and turned to nursing the poor after a family tragedy. She pioneered nurse midwifery, founding the Frontier Nursing Service and later the Frontier School of Midwifery and Nursing. She also held racist beliefs, promoting white superiority, segregation, and eugenics, and she refused to hire Black midwives. During the 1918 flu pandemic she nursed in Washington, D.C. tenements, and after World War I she organized a nursing program in war-stricken France.

Virginia Henderson

Virginia Henderson (1897-1996) shaped nursing education with her Need Theory, which held that the goal of nursing is to help patients reach independence as quickly as possible. She spread the theory through her teaching and writing, especially her revision of the "Textbook of the Principles and Practices of Nursing" (1939) and "Basic Principles of Nursing Care" (1972), and she advanced research by leading the first nursing literature indexing project.

Hazel W. Johnson-Brown

Hazel W. Johnson-Brown (1927-2011) was denied entry to the local nursing school in West Chester, Pennsylvania, because she was Black. She trained in New York instead and enlisted in the Army, earning promotion after promotion. She became director of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Nursing, served as chief nurse of the Army hospital in Seoul, and rose to brigadier general commanding the Army Nurse Corps, the first Black woman to do so.

Mary Eliza Mahoney

Mary Eliza Mahoney (1845-1926) was the first African American nurse to complete official nurse training. In 1879 she graduated from the rigorous nursing school at the New England Hospital for Women and Children, where she had previously worked as a janitor and cook. She was one of the first Black members of what became the American Nurses Association and cofounded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses.

Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) advanced the profession more than anyone of her era. She founded the world's first science-based nursing school, was among the first to insist on diligent handwashing, and developed the Royal Commission for the Health of the Army. She also caused harm: she supported colonizing policies, condoned removing Indigenous children from their families to send them to abusive boarding schools, and held racist views of Indigenous peoples, and her political actions after the Crimean War contributed to the genocide of Indigenous people.

Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) worked as a visiting nurse in New York City's tenements when it was illegal to prescribe or mail birth control information, and she fought for access to contraception and to that information. She founded the American Birth Control League, later Planned Parenthood, in 1921. She also believed in eugenics and aligned with ableist and white supremacist ideologies that undermined reproductive rights for minority groups.

Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) was an informally trained nurse as well as an activist who fought for abolition and equality and pushed for formal nurse education for African American women. Her "Ain't I a Woman?" speech, delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention and demanding equality for women and African Americans, made her one of the most famous nurses in history.

Betty Smith Williams

Betty Smith Williams (1929-present) was the first African American to graduate from the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University and the first to teach at a college or university in California. In 1971 she cofounded the Council of Black Nurses, Los Angeles, became a founding member of the National Black Nurses Association, and later cofounded and led the National Coalition of Ethnic Minority Nurse Associations.