Martha E. Rogers

Martha Elizabeth Rogers (1914 to 1994) was an American nurse, researcher, theorist and author. Born in Dallas, Texas, she began pre-medical studies at the University of Tennessee, then took a nursing diploma at Knoxville General Hospital School of Nursing in 1936 and went on to public health nursing study at George Peabody College, Teachers College of Columbia University and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where she earned a doctorate in 1954. She specialized in public health nursing, established the Visiting Nurse Service of Phoenix, Arizona, and from 1952 to 1975 was professor and head of the Division of Nursing at New York University. She developed the Science of Unitary Human Beings, set out in her book An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing (1970); critics such as the physicist Alan Sokal have called its postulates pseudoscientific. She was inducted posthumously into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1996.