Dock, Lavinia Lloyd

Dock, Lavinia Lloyd (1858–1956) nurse, social reformer; born in Harrisburg, Pa. Born into a prosperous family, she chose to train as a nurse at New York City's Bellevue Hospital (1884–86); after serving as a visiting nurse among the poor, she compiled the first, and long most important, manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses (1890). After stints at Johns Hopkins (Baltimore) and Cook County (Chicago) hospitals, she joined the Nurses' Settlement in New York City (1896–1915); working closely with Lillian Wald, she strove not only to improve the health of the poor but also to improve the profession of nursing through her teaching, lecturing, and writing. She played a major role as a contributing editor to the American Journal of Nursing, and she linked American nurses' goals to similar efforts in England. She also did most of the work for A History of Nursing (2 vols., 1907; 2 more vols., 1912; later revised and abridged). Although she gave up nursing as a practice around the age of 50, she dedicated her energies to outspoken activism on controversial social issues of the day—improved working conditions, the elimination of prostitution and venereal diseases, and women's rights, especially women's right to vote. (She was jailed briefly three times for taking part in militant suffrage demonstrations.) Never one to avoid unpopular positions, she spoke out against World War I and she was an early advocate of birth control. She retired to her home in Pennsylvania about 1922, but in her long remaining years maintained her interest in and ties to the causes she had fought for.