Hildegard Peplau

Hildegard E. Peplau (1909 to 1999) was an American nurse who is described as the first published nursing theorist since Florence Nightingale. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, to immigrant parents of German descent, she began her nursing career in 1931 after graduating from the Pottstown Hospital School of Nursing, and later earned a bachelor's degree in interpersonal psychology at Bennington College, where field work at Chestnut Lodge brought her into contact with Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Harry Stack Sullivan. She served in the US Army Nurse Corps from 1943 to 1945, held master's and doctoral degrees from Teachers College, Columbia University, and taught at Rutgers from 1954 to 1974, where she created the first graduate program preparing clinical specialists in psychiatric nursing. Her middle-range theory of interpersonal relations changed nursing scholarship, she advised the World Health Organization, and she served as president of the American Nurses Association from 1970 to 1972. She also contributed to mental health law reform and argued for therapeutic rather than custodial care of patients.