Lavinia Dock Essay

The contributions of Lavinia Dock to the field of nursing, as well as to women’s rights, are immense: as an activist, socialist, writer, leader, and nurse, her legacy continues. Dock’s decision to enter nursing, lead Dock to being involved in not only the avocation for nursing and unionization but for the suffragette movement as well. Throughout this biography, Dock’s tremendous endeavors in the fields of nursing advocacy and education as well as the context in which she lived, will be discussed.
Born 1858, Lavinia Loyd Dock fortuitously belonged to a well-off family in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Dock enjoyed a comfortable life leading up to her decision to study nursing. The Dock family was a well-educated one, and Lavinia Dock described her
She contributed greatly to the International Council of Nurses, gave speeches on nursing, and published several works. Along with Adelaide Nutting, she published the History of Nursing and, by herself, Hygiene & Morality. Furthermore, she developed one of the earliest textbooks for nursing, A Materia Medica for Nurses. Dock believed firmly in the importance of preserving nursing history and that the thorough documentation of this history would allow nursing to be recognized professionally (Fee, Garofalo, 2015). She advocated for the registration of nurses and understood the power and influence of an organized front, and in her article in the American Journal of Nursing, she described what nurses could expect from the law.
Lavinia Loyd Dock was an American nurse, activist, writer, and pioneer in advocacy. Her contributions have added prestige to the profession of nursing and she was one of the many voices that led to white women gaining the right to vote. She spoke of social reform and understood the importance of unionization; however, most remarkably, she not only preached, she happily lived in the conditions she hoped to change. Her long life was one of the many that contributed to the complex history of