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Lavinia Dock

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Lavinia Dock

Lavinia Lloyd Dock (February 26, 1858 – April 17, 1956) was an American nurse, feminist, writer, pioneer in nursing education and social activist. Dock was an assistant superintendent at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing under Isabel Hampton Robb. She founded what would become the National League for Nursing with Robb and Mary Adelaide Nutting. Dock was a contributing editor to the American Journal of Nursing and authored several books, including a four-volume history of nursing (with M. Adelaide Nutting as co-author) and Materia Medica for Nurses, the nurse's standard manual of drugs for many years. In her later life, she also campaigned for social reform, particularly women's rights.

Lavinia Dock was born one of six children in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on February 26, 1858. Dock's mother died when she was eighteen. She and her siblings were financially independent due to an income from a land that their parents inherited, which allowed her greater choice in her career path.

In 1884, Dock enrolled at the Bellevue Hospital School of Nursing in New York and graduated in 1886, working there afterwards as a night supervisor.

In 1888, Dock worked with Jane Delano, a young nurse who later founded the American Red Cross Nursing Service, at a Florida hospital during a yellow fever outbreak. Dock also worked with Clara Barton in the spring of 1889 helping victims of a flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Previously at Bellevue, Dock herself experienced the problems nursing students faced when studying drugs. In 1890, financed by her father, she authored the first nurses' drug manual, Materia Medica for Nurses. It became a standard nursing school text and sold over one hundred thousand copies.

In 1890, Dock was appointed to Johns Hopkins School of Nursing as the assistant superintendent under Isabel Hampton Robb, with whom she remained lifelong friends. Dock took on the responsibilities of first-year and ward teaching.

In 1893, Dock founded, with the assistance of Robb and Mary Adelaide Nutting (the latter her student at Hopkins), and became the secretary of the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses of the United States and Canada, which became the National League for Nursing. That year she also formed the Nurses' Associated Alumnae, now the American Nurses Association.

When Dock left Hopkins in 1896 at age 38, she moved to the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and worked as a visiting nurse for twenty years. She worked with poor immigrant laborers, providing preventive care and health education.

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