Dorothea Lynde Dix was born in Hampden, Maine, and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her parents were alcoholics, and her father was abusive. At 12, she and her two brothers moved to live with her grandmother in Boston. At 14, she taught at a school for girls in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she developed a curriculum for her class that focused on natural sciences and ethical living. Five years later, she returned to Boston and opened a school for girls from wealthy families and a charity school for poor and neglected children she ran from her grandmother’s barn. Her declined health has forced her to give up her teaching career, and she began to work as a governess. In 1836, after suffering a breakdown, she was encouraged to travel to Europe to improve her health. While visiting England, she met a group of social reformers who advocated for government involvement in social welfare, especially in the management of mental institutions and asylums. Back in the US, she started teaching female prisoners at East Cambridge House of Correction. There, she observed the inhumane conditions of the mentally ill, who were locked in the dark basements without heat and sanitary facilities, being flogged and chained to the walls. Dix embarked on a two-year journey throughout the state, visiting asylums and prisons and recording the disgraceful conditions she examined. In 1845, she published her conclusions in a report titled Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States. After presenting it to the Massachusetts legislature, he increased the budget of the State Mental Hospital at Worcester. Her local successes drove her to expand her efforts to the entire country. She visited facilities in the north and the south, from New York and Pennsylvania to the Carolinas and Louisiana, documenting the treatment of patients, lobbing for improving asylums’ conditions, and adding more hospitals for the mentally ill. She reached out to politicians, advocation to pass federal legislation to establish supervised national asylums; in 1848, US Congress approved a bill to secure 12 million acres of land for the cause. Unfortunately, it got vetoed by President Franklin Pierce in 1854. Following the setback, Dix returned to Europe, continuing her investigation on mental treatment throughout the continent and lobbying for reforms for its improvement. Thanks to her efforts, numerous new institutes were established in Italy, Scotland, England, and the Channel Islands. During the American Civil War, she volunteered as a nurse in the Union Army and was appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses. In this position, she was in charge of setting up field hospitals, managing supplies, recruiting nurses, and overseeing their training programs. While most male doctors opposed the presence of female nurses, Dix appointed more than 3,000 female nurses to the Union Army and advanced the role of field women nurses for years to come. When the war ended, Dix resumed her campaign to improve the caring conditions of the mentally ill and the disabled, leading to the founding of more than 30 institutes across the US and Canada. In 1870, at 68, she contracted malaria and had to give up her traveling, though she continued to promote the cause by every other means available to her. 1881, at 79, she moved into a designated suite built for her in the New Jersey State Hospital, an institute that she had founded. She died six years later, at the age of 85. Read more...

Born in 1862 at Montour Falls, NY, Jane Arminda Delano’s life was devoted strictly to the profession of nursing. She studied at Cook Academy of her hometown and later graduated Bellevue Hospital School of Nursing in New York City. Her career included working and volunteering in various States, taking on leadership roles as the director of the Training School for Nurses, president of the American Nurses Association, and Superintendent of US Army Nurse Corps. She created the American Red Cross Nursing Service by uniting the organizations she led, training nurses for duty, and supporting teams in wars. She worked intensively, at one point fulfilling four different positions, only taking two years off to treat her dying mother. Her life was largely informed by wars – losing her father without knowing him in the Civil War, joining the New York Red Cross during Spanish-American War, and her most notable achievement for US history: recruiting more than 20,000 nurses to serve in World War I. As a pioneer in raising public health awareness, Delano initiated a popular course and a textbook, “Elementary Hygiene and Home Care of the Sick.” She advanced and dignified the professional status of nurses in her capacity as president of the Board of Directors of the American Journal of Nursing and president of the American Nurses Association. Delano died at the age of 57 from illness while on a mission to visit nurses in post-war France. Five hundred nurses attended her funeral in Savenay, France. The following year her body was relocated to Arlington National Cemetery in the US. The public records of her story include almost no mentioning of personal life, such as love, children, or hobbies. Read more...

Born to poor African-American farmers of tobacco fields. Her mother died when she was 4 years old, and she was sent to live with her grandfather in a room with her 9-year old cousin, David “Day” Lacks, who later became her husband. By the time she was 14, they had their first child and later moved to Baltimore, MD. In 1950, right after she gave birth to her fifth child, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital, which was the only one in the area that was treating black people. Blood samples were taken from her cervix, a healthy one and a cancerous one, without her knowledge (which was not required by the law in 1950). The samples were named ‘HeLa’, as the conventional way, based on the first and last names of the patient. A physician and cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins examined the samples and noticed that the cancerous cells continue multiplying themselves endlessly. This was the first time the medicine field encounter this phenomenon of immortalized cells, a source of cells that never ends. Without her family’s knowledge or consent, HeLa cells were used in many types of research, playing a crucial role in key developments, inventions, and patents in the medical field, such as vaccines, gene mapping, drug developments and more. Henrietta Lacks died in October 1951, ten months after her diagnosis. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the family cemetery in Lackstown, VA.   Read more...

Clara Barton was born in Massachusetts. When she was ten, she started practicing her nursing skills when taking care of her older brother for two years after he fell from a roof and got severely injured; she even learned how to place leeches on his body. Barton’s parents encouraged her to become a teacher to overcome her shyness. At 24, Barton founded a school for workers’ children and later established the first free school in New Jersey. When the school became successful, the board replaced her with a man, and Barton got demoted, so she quit. Barton moved to Washington, DC, and started working as a clerk in the US Patent office; she was the first woman appointed to such a position in a federal office and got equally paid as her male colleagues. When the Civil War began, she quit her job to support the Union soldiers. Barton distributed supplies and served as an independent nurse, and therefore received the nickname ‘The angel of the battlefield.’ After the war, she established the Office of Missing Soldiers, helping identify soldiers, reunite them with their families, or arrange burials. The office has became a museum. After learning about the International Red Cross while traveling in Europe, Barton started lobbying and building support to establish an American chapter of the organization. The American Red Cross was founded in 1881, with Barton serving as its first president. At the age of 83, after she was forced to resign from the Red Cross due to autocratic leadership, Barton founded the National First Aid Society. Barton remained an activist for human rights and the women’s suffrage movement, giving lectures until her last years. She also published an autobiography. The Clara Barton National Historic Site, established in 1975, was the first National Historic Site in the U.S. honoring the legacy of a woman.   Dive deeper into the inspiring story of Clara Barton with our fun and engaging printable worksheet! Available now on Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers. Read more...