America’s First Trained Nurse Linda Richards (1841–1930) was the first professionally trained nurse in the United States. Her experiences with nursing her dying mother and her husband, who was wounded in the Civil War, inspired Richards to become a nurse. She was the first student to enroll in the first nurse training school at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in 1872. She established nurse training programs in the United States and Japan, and created the first system for keeping individual medical records for hospitalized patients. Linda Richards was born on July 27, 1841, the youngest daughter of Sanford Richards, an itinerant preacher who christened her Malinda Ann Judson Richards by her father, in hopes she would someday…
