Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first black professional nurse in the U.S. She co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN), which worked to eliminate racial discrimination within the registered nursing profession. Mahoney was born in 1845 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents were freed slaves, who had moved north from Carolina before the Civil …
Bridget “Biddy” Mason was an African-American nurse, real estate entrepreneur and philanthropist. She was able to support her extended family for generations due to her financial success. Mason was born into slavery in 1818 in Mississippi. She was named Bridget and given no last name. Mason was owned by slaveholders in Georgia and South Carolina …
Dr. Justina Ford was an American physician who become the first female African American physician licensed to practice in Denver, Colorado, challenging and overcoming gender and racial barriers to succeed in her medical career. She practiced gynaecology, obstetrics, and paediatrics from her home for half a century. Ford was born in 1871 in Knoxville, Illinois. …
Mary Seacole was a Jamaican-born nurse who helped soldiers during the Crimean War by setting up a “British Hotel” behind the lines for sick and convalescent officers. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991. Seacole was born Mary Grant in 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica. She was of Scottish and Creole descent …
Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States. She was a pioneer in educating women in medicine and a leading public health activist. Blackwell was born in 1821 in Bristol, England to Samuel and Hannah Blackwell. Her father was a dissenter, and so his children were denied public …
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was an English physician and feminist, she was the first female doctor to qualify in England. She opened a school of medicine for women, and paved the way for women’s medical education in Britain. Anderson was born in 1836 in Whitechapel, London to Newson and Louisa Dunnell Garrett. Her father had previously …
Nawal El Saadawi is an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician and psychiatrist. El Saadawi was born in 1931 in the small village of Kafr Tahla. Her family were a mix of traditional and progressive. At the age of six El Saadawi was pinned down by four women in her home in Egypt and was subjected …
Clara Barton was a pioneer in the field of nursing and one of the founders of the American Red Cross. Barton realised that she was destined to become a nurse when her brother David became seriously ill after a barn-raising accident, 11 year old Barton nursed him for two years. After David recovered Barton was …
Dr. Marie Maynard Daly was the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in Chemistry. Daly was brought up in a family that valued education, her father had emigrated from the West Indies and enrolled at Cornell University to study chemistry, unfortunately he had to drop out due to a lack of money. Daly attended …
Florence Nightingale is known as ‘the founder of modern nursing’ and is famously thought of as ‘The Lady with the Lamp’. She is named after Florence, Italy, her place of birth. Nightingale was active in helping those less fortunate than herself early in her life, helping those who were ill or poor in the village …