The mother of military nursing

Hester Maclean did not start out to be a nurse. It wasn’t until her father fell ill and needed to be nursed that she was inspired to study nursing.
Now she is a winner of the Florence Nightingale Medal and is sometimes thought of as the mother of military nursing.
She was born in Sofala in New South Wales, Australia on February 25, 1859, to Harold and Emily Maclean and enjoyed a privileged upbringing and education. Her mother died in 1860 and she was raised by her step mother Agnes Campbell.
But when her father became ill in 1889 she saw the nurse who helped him and resolved to seek nursing as a career.
She began nursing training at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in 1890, qualifying in August 1893 before going into private nursing. After that she worked at a number of hospitals gaining a midwifery certificate and working at an asylum.
Maclean applied for and got the post of assistant inspector of hospitals in New Zealand and held that position from November 1906 until her retirement in 1923. She was also designated director of the division of nursing in the new Department of Health in 1920.
Considered a formidable woman, she was responsible for nursing and midwifery education and registration as well as assistant inspector of mental hospitals. She also believed in hard work which could be uncomfortable as members of a profession that gave service to mankind,
Not all her ideas were progressive, she did not believe in the eight hour day, saying nurses needed to adjust their days to the needs of the patient.
She oversaw the development of Plunket, tuberculosis, school and backblocks district nursing, independent midwifery, the Māori health nursing service and nursing training for Māori women.
In 1908 she began to publish a nursing journal called Kai Tiaki (guardian) and continued it the rest of her life.
Maclean was appointed matron in chief of a proposed military nursing reserve in 1911 and fought for the right of nurses to serve overseas.
The New Zealand Army Nursing Service was established in 1915 and Maclean selected and equipped all army nurses during the war, making a point of seeing them off and greeting them on return. In April 1915 she escorted the first 50 nurses to Egypt herself, dealing with hospital placements, accommodation problems and disagreeable doctors and military personnel who refused to recognise nurses' officer status, a problem never fully resolved.
She wanted to stay but was needed back in New Zealand, in part due to shortages in nursing staff, made worse by the influenza epidemic in 1918 and 1919. Her work was recognised in the awards of the Royal Red Cross (first class) in 1917 and the Florence Nightingale Medal in 1920.
She retired in 1923 and she continued to live in Wellington and wrote her autobiography, Nursing in New Zealand.
She died in Wellington on September 2, 1932, having never married and received a full military funeral before being buried in Karori Cemetery.​