Virginia Henderson

Nurse, nursing educator, and author

Born: November 30, 1897; Kansas City, Missouri

Death: March 19, 1996; Connecticut

Also known as: Virginia Avenel Henderson

Education: Army School of Nursing, Teachers College, Columbia University

Significance: Considered by many to be the foremost nurse of the twentieth century and the mother of nursing, Virginia Henderson's career of practicing nursing and teaching others how to practice it spanned seven decades. She also authored several nursing textbooks and compiled the available written material on nursing to provide a comprehensive resource for nurses and nursing students.

Background

Virginia Avenel Henderson was born on November 30, 1897, in Kansas City, Missouri, the fifth of eight children. Henderson's mother, Lucy Minor Abbot, was a Virginia native who missed her home state so much she named her young daughter for it. Her father, Daniel Brosius Henderson, was both a teacher and an attorney; he won several noteworthy cases during his time representing Native Americans against the US government. Her family believed in education and when Henderson was four, she was sent to a preparatory school in Virginia run by her maternal grandfather, William Richardson Abbot.

During World War I, Henderson was inspired to begin nursing school and entered the Army School of Nursing in Washington, DC. In addition to the military training provided at the school, Henderson also took academic classes at Teachers College of Columbia University. She completed her nursing training in 1921 and worked for a time at New York City's Henry Street Settlement. She later returned to Virginia, where she became the first teacher in the school of nursing at Norfolk Presbyterian Hospital.

In 1929, Henderson left the hospital and returned to New York and Columbia University to complete her bachelor's and master's degrees in nursing. She attended school with the help of a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation. Henderson took a short break from her studies to work in Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, ultimately completing her degrees in 1934.

Life's Work

Following the completion of her formal training, Henderson worked in teaching hospitals around New York City while also teaching nursing at Teachers' College. She would do this for sixteen years. In between her hands-on work, Henderson also wrote about nursing.

Her first foray into writing about nursing came in 1939 at the request of Macmillan Publishing Company. Macmillan was the publisher of the preferred nursing textbook of the time, a volume written by Canadian nurse Bertha Harmer. The publisher asked Henderson to handle the revisions of its fourth edition. A more in-depth revision followed as Henderson rewrote that text into an all-new Textbook of the Principles and Practice of Nursing. So much had changed with the addition of new medications, such as antibiotics, and new techniques for hygiene and patient safety and comfort, that a total revision was needed. In the new text, Henderson also put forward her belief that the nurse's job was to help the patient heal and be free of the need for help as quickly as was possible. Her "need theory" was based on the idea that people do not want to be sick and that helping them to become independent and able to meet their own needs once again was the best help a nurse could provide. The new textbook, published in 1955, also emphasized the nurse's responsibility to the patient, not the physician.

Henderson went on to write another standard text to help nurses who had limited access to technology and other assistance for disease diagnosis. At the request of the International Council of Nurses, Henderson wrote Basic Principles of Nursing Care, originally published in the 1960s and revised in the early 1970s. It was eventually translated into nearly thirty languages and remains in publication in the twenty-first century.

Her masterwork was a compilation of all the available professional nursing literature. Written in four volumes, the Nursing Studies Index took Henderson almost two decades to complete. Published in 1972, the index made it much easier for nurses and nursing students to find information that they needed in the days before the Internet.

Throughout the many years when she was writing, Henderson continued to be involved in nursing and in teaching. She spent sixteen years on the staff of Teachers' College beginning in 1934 and became a research associate at Yale School of Nursing in 1953. While serving as a research associate, she helped increase knowledge of the techniques and importance of the nursing profession through a series of editorials published in medical journals.

Henderson was in her seventies when she began yet another edition of the Principles and Practice of Nursing. Working from the Nursing Studies Index she had completed, Henderson and a team of eighteen writers condensed their combined experience and the writings of many others into a comprehensive text that was complete enough for nurses but understandable enough for a motivated lay person to use.

Throughout her career, Henderson advocated for universal health care, or health care available to all, regardless of their financial or social position. Henderson opposed for-profit health care and believed the full focus should be on improving life for everyone. She felt nurses should be empowered to help their patients, and patients should be empowered to help improve and protect their own health.

Henderson continued writing and advocating for better health care and improved standards for nurses up until her death in a hospice in Connecticut on March 19, 1996. She was buried with her family in Bedford County, Virginia, in the cemetery at St. Stephen's Church.

Impact

Virginia Henderson is considered by many to be the most famous nurse of the twentieth century. In addition to her impact on countless students whom she taught personally or instructed through her writings, Henderson is credited with elevating the professional status of nursing. At the start of her career, nursing was considered a semi-skilled position that could and often was handled by people not physically capable of helping in other ways, such as in combat. By the end of her career, nursing was a respected and highly-skilled profession. In addition to her published writings, her legacy includes the creation of a system for nurses to write down their patient observations for physicians, a system that continues to be used by nurses in the twenty-first century.

In 2023, a group of four regional hospitals and dozens of clinics in Central Virginia inaugurated the Virginia Henderson Institute of Clinical Excellence Nurse Leader Academy to train nurses in the Centra Health system, which covers the region.

Personal Life

Henderson was survived by one sister and several nieces and nephews.

Bibliography

Todd, Dena, Joan Deal, and Christopher Parker. "Virginia Henderson Institute of Clinical Excellence Nurse Leader Academy." Nurse Leader, vol. 22, no. 1, February 2024, pp. 66–72, www.nurseleader.com/article/S1541-4612(23)00155-6/fulltext. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

"Hall of Fame Inductees." American Nurses Association, www.nursingworld.org/ana/about-ana/history/hall-of-fame/1996-1998-inductees/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Thomas Jr., Robert McG. "Virginia Henderson, 98, Teacher of Nurses, Dies." New York Times, 22 March 1996, www.nytimes.com/1996/03/22/arts/virginia-henderson-98-teacher-of-nurses-dies.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Vera, Matt. "Virginia Henderson's Nursing Need Theory." NursesLabs, 6 Aug. 2014, nurseslabs.com/virginia-hendersons-need-theory/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.