Hildegard Peplau.

Nurse and psychiatric nursing theorist. Hildegard Peplau was born on September 1, 1909, in Reading, Pennsylvania, into a German American family as one of six children. Even as a young child, she was a keen observer of human behavior. At the age of nine, a major flu epidemic raged across the world, striking down between 30 and 50 million people worldwide and killing approximately 675,000 Americans. The pandemic had a major impact on Peplau, and she determined that she wanted to become a nurse. She was trained in her home state of Pennsylvania at the Pottstown Hospital School of Nursing, completing her nursing degree in 1931. Nursing was still a relatively young field at the time, and professional aspects of the field were still being developed.