Helen Esther Fitzgerald was born in 1914 in Lexington, Massachusetts. She was the daughter of John G. and Helen K. Fitzgerald. Helen E. Fitzgerald graduated from the Children's Hospital School of Nursing in 1935 and became a nurse anesthetist at Children's Hospital for six years. Helen E. Fitzgerald volunteered for the army after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, Fifth Harvard Medical Unit. She saw 45 months of active service as an operating room nurse anesthetist in both England and France and was part of the Normandy invasion of France in June 1944. After leaving the Army, Helen E. Fitzgerald did hematology research at the Blood Grouping Laboratories in Boston until her retirement in 1982.

Information compiled from obituary in the Lexington Minute-Man Thursday, February 6, 1992.