Dock, Lavinia Lloyd (1858-1956)

US nurse and social reformer. She nursed among the poor and compiled a manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses (1890). Through her teaching, lecturing, and writing, she strove to improve both the health of the poor and the nursing profession.

Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania into a prosperous family, she chose to train as a nurse at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. After stints at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and Cook County Hospital in Chicago hospitals, she joined the Nurses' Settlement in New York City. She worked closely with Lillian Wald. She also did most of the work for A History of Nursing (2 vols, 1907; 2 more vols, 1912). 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 sexually transmitted 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.