Nursing Leader: Lavinia Dock

This is a series of post regarding notable nursing leaders who have given many contribution to nursing and their influence uplifted the nursing profession.


Nursing Leaders
Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, Lillian Wald, Lavinia Dock, Margaret Sanger, and Mary Breckinridge are among the leaders who have made notable contributions both to nursing's history and to women's history. These women were all politically astute pioneers. Their skills at influencing others and bringing about change remain models for political nurse activists today. Contemporary nursing leaders, such as Virginia Henderson, who created a modern worldwide definition of nursing, and Martha Rogers, a catalyst for theory  development.


Dock (1858-1956)
Lavinia L. Dock was a feminist, prolific writer, political activist, suffragette, and friend- of Wald. She participated in protest movements for women's rights that resulted in the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. In addition, Dock campaigned for legislation to allow nurses rather than physicians to control their profession. In 1893, Dock, with the assistance of Mary Adelaide Nutting and Isabel Hampton Robb, founded the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses of the United States and Canada, a precursor to the current National League for Nursing.

Biography

 Lavinia Dock was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1858. She graduated from the Bellevue Training School for Nurses in 1886. In 1889 she helped in the disaster relief effort following the devastating flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. In 1890 she became Isabel Hampton's assistant superintendent at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School for Nurses, where she was in charge of instruction . The same year, her textbook Materia Medica for Nurses which quickly became a standard in Nursing curriculum was published. She spoke at the Columbian Exposition at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. In 1907, along with Mary Adelaide Nutting she wrote the illustrated A History of Nursing. She went on to write more books on the history of nursing, including A Short History of Nursing with Isabel M. Stewart in 1920, and History of American Red Cross Nursing with Sarah E. Pickett in 1922. She was a member of the Nurses' Settlement in New York, Secretary of the American Federation of Nurses and of the International Council of Nurses. She was also a member of the National Women's Party which campaigned for the equal rights amendment introduced in 1923. She served as secretary for the International Council of Nurses from 1899 to 1922. From 1900 to 1923 she was a contributing editor for the American Journal of Nursing's "Foreign Department". She was made an honorary member of the Johns Hopkins Nurses' Alumnae Association at its founding in 1892. In 1976 she was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame.