Inspiration for activism!
- “Compassionate, and unconventional, soon becoming an ardent pacifist and then a militant suffragist” from AJPH
- Despite objections from other nurses who believed nurses should not be involved politically, Dock organized and engaged in picketing and
Lavinia Dock
protesting on behalf of the vote for women in the United States, organizing protests and campaigns for suffrage; she was arrested at least 3 times for attempting to vote.
- Devoted to a wide range of issues in addition to women’s suffrage, including better housing for immigrants, safe working conditions, state and national legislation to regulate child labor, pensions and health insurance.
- Worked tirelessly for better standards and practices for nursing education; she wrote, financed and published Materia Medica for Nurses, a nursing textbook of pharmacology.
- Served as a visiting nurse with the House on Henry Street in New York City, contributing to standards for public health nursing world-wide.
- Co-authored, with Adelaide Nutting, “A History of Nursing,” believing that nursing would not be fully accepted until its history had been fully documented. This work has been recognized as “culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.”
More information here and here.
Lavinia Dock papers here.
NurseManifest 
Wonderful
A real role model for all of us particularly nurses in these troubled and divisive times.
I love this project
Hope it’s get put into a book someday soon.
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We love this project too!! We don’t have a plan for a book, but the link to the posts, and the “gallery” view will be around for a long long time! Check the links to these summaries in the sidebar menu, and also on the main menu under the 2018 think tank main menu!
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Love stories about Lavinia. She was a woman of action. Have the book she had published on medications using family money so nurses had a resource,
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Thank you so much for these! I was talking to some of my grad students a couple weeks ago (in a course that covers policy, etc) and none of them had heard of the Henry Street Settlement or Lillian Wald or Margaret Sanger, etc. It made me wonder if we no longer teach nursing history?
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Amazing … I do believe that it is past time to make sure we do teach the history of nursing – not as a boring timeline, but conveying the rich and wonderful work that happens despite great odds!
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