The year 1849 proved a memorable one in the career of Florence Nightingale, for it was then that she enrolled herself as a voluntary nurse in the Deaconess Institution at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, which may be described as her Alma Mater. It was the first training school for sick nurses established in modern times, and it seems a happy conjunction of circumstances that she who was destined to hold the blue riband of the nursing sisterhood of the world should have studied within its walls.

Although she had already gained valuable insight into hospital work and management during her visits to various hospitals at home and abroad, it was not until she came to Kaiserswerth that she found her ideals realised. Here was a Protestant institution which had all the good points of the Roman Catholic sisterhoods without their restrictions. It further commended itself as being under the guidance of Pastor Fliedner, a man of simple and devoted piety and a born philanthropist.

He had had the perspicacity to see that the world needed the services of trained women to grapple with the evils of vice and disease, and to this end he revived the office of deaconess which had been instituted by the early Christian Church. The idea of training women to minister to the sick and the poor seems natural enough to-day, but in Miss Nightingale’s young womanhood it was entirely novel. The district nurse had not then been invented. The Kaiserswerth institution combined hospital routine and instruction with beneficent work among the poor and the outcast.

Pastor Fliedner, the founder, was indeed a kindred spirit, and it seems fitting to give a little account of the man who exercised such a remarkable influence over our heroine in the days of her probation. Theodore Fliedner was just twenty years her senior, having been born in 1800 at Eppstein, a small village near the Rhine. He was “a son of the manse,” both his father and grandfather having been Lutheran clergymen. At an early age he showed a desire to become a power for good in the world, and his sensitive feelings were much hurt when a child, by his father playfully calling him “the little beer-brewer” on account of his plump round figure. The jest caused little Theodore much heart-searching and made him feel that his nature must be very carnal and in need of great discipline. In these days he would probably have resorted to Sandow’s exercises or a bicycle.

Of course Theodore was poor and had to work his way from school to college. He studied at the Universities of Giessen and Göttingen, giving instruction in return for food and lodging, and was not above doing manual labour also. He sawed wood, blacked boots, and did other odd jobs. He also mended his own clothes, but in a somewhat primitive fashion, for in a letter to his mother he says that he sewed up the holes in his trousers with white thread which he afterwards inked over. His vacations were spent in tramping long distances and subsisting on the barest necessaries of life, in order to gain an acquaintance with the world. He studied foreign languages, read widely, and as a college student showed the after bent of his mind by collecting songs and games for children which later were used in his own kindergarten, and have spread throughout the world. He also learned the use of herbs and acquired much homely knowledge on the treatment of disease.

After leaving college he became tutor in a private family at Cologne, and the mother of his pupils took his deportment in hand. Possibly this lady had physical culture views about the rotundity of his figure. However, Theodore in speaking of the benefit derived from lessons in deportment quaintly confesses that “gentle ways and polite manners help greatly to further the kingdom of God.” While at Cologne he assisted a clergyman of the place in parish work, and occasionally preached in the prison, thus gaining an insight into the unhappy condition of discharged prisoners which inspired his later beneficent work on their behalf.

When he had reached the age of twenty-two, Theodore Fliedner received a call to become the pastor of a struggling Protestant community at the little town of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, near Düsseldorf, which he accepted. At Eppstein, his native village, he was ordained, surrounded by a delighted family circle. It is characteristic that the young pastor set out on foot for Kaiserswerth, and arrived before he was expected in order to save his parishioners the expense of giving him a reception.

His position was humbler even than Goldsmith’s Vicar, for he received the modest yearly stipend of 180 thaler (£27), and had to share the parsonage with the mother of his predecessor, while in order to relieve his own widowed mother he took two younger brothers and a sister to live with him. Hardly was his modest household arranged, than a velvet-factory upon which the Protestant population of Kaiserswerth depended failed, and the young pastor found himself with a destitute flock. He received two other calls, but his heart was fixed at Kaiserswerth, and he determined to set forth staff in hand like the Apostles, and tramp through the Protestant countries seeking aid for his people. He visited Germany, Holland, and England, and received help and encouragement.

The most important friendship which the young Lutheran pastor made in London was with Elizabeth Fry. The work of this noble philanthropist amongst the prisoners of Newgate was a revelation to him, and he returned to his parish of Kaiserswerth burning with zeal to do something for the prisoners of his own land. He began work in the neighbouring prison of Düsseldorf, where he became a regular visitor and started services. On June 26th, 1826, he was instrumental in founding at Düsseldorf the first German society for improving prison discipline.

The great problem which confronted him was how to protect the discharged female prisoners from the life of evil to which their unhappy circumstances drove them when the term of their imprisonment ended. They had as a rule neither home nor protector, and were cast upon the world with the prisoner’s brand upon them. He determined to devote himself to the rescue and protection of these unfortunate women.

In September of 1833 he began his experiment by preparing with his own hands an old summer-house, some twelve feet square, which stood in a retired part of his garden as a refuge for discharged female prisoners. He protected it from wind and rain, made it clean and habitable, and placing there a bed, a table, and a chair, prayed that God would direct some outcast wanderer to its shelter. One night a poor forlorn woman presented herself, and the pastor and his good wife led her to the room prepared. This destitute creature housed in the old summer-house was practically the inauguration of the now famous Kaiserswerth institution. In the course of the winter nine other women voluntarily sought the refuge, and the work went forward until a new separate building was erected near the pastor’s house, having its own garden and field and affording accommodation for twenty women. Madame Fliedner, the founder’s wife, and Mademoiselle Göbel, a voluntary helper, had charge of the penitentiary.

Some of the women had children, and Pastor Fliedner’s next step was to start an infant school on very much the same lines as a modern kindergarten. Now it was that the children’s games and songs which it had been his hobby to collect during his tramps abroad when a college student became of use. Teachers were needed for the increasing school, and in course of time a Normal school for the training of infant-school mistresses was started.

However, the idea which most actively dominated the pastor’s mind was the training of women in hospital work and to tend the poor. In his parish of Kaiserswerth there was much poverty and incompetence amongst the people and no provision for dealing with disease. Three years after he had founded the penitentiary for discharged female prisoners, as already described, he started his more important venture of founding a hospital for the reception of poor patients and for the training of nurses or deaconesses.

On October 13th, 1836, the “Deaconess Hospital, Kaiserswerth,” was opened, practically without patients and without deaconesses. For his hospital the pastor had secured a part of the deserted factory, the stopping of which had plunged his people into destitution in the first year of his pastorate—a singular example of the realisation of poetic justice. He fitted the “wards” with mended furniture, cracked earthenware, and such utensils as he could beg. His stock of linen embraced only six sheets. But cleanliness cost nothing, and the hospital certainly had that. On the Sunday morning after the opening the first patient, a poor suffering servant girl, knocked at the door for admittance. Four other sick persons came during the month, and in the course of a year sixty patients had been received in the primitive hospital, and funds were coming in for the support of the work.

Almost simultaneously with the patients came the nurses. First a solitary candidate presented herself for training as a deaconess and several probationers followed. In the course of a year seven nurses had entered the institution. There was nothing haphazard about their admission, for the pastor, when he instituted his order of Protestant deaconesses, made a simple code of rules. No deaconess was to be under twenty-five years of age, and although she was engaged for a term of five years, she was free to leave at any moment. The candidates were solemnly received into the community and consecrated to their work by the laying on of hands by the pastor, who invoked a final blessing in the words: “May God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, three Persons in one God, bless you; may He stablish you in the Truth until death, and give you hereafter the Crown of Life. Amen.”

The dress of the deaconesses is very quaint and simple, but not unbecoming. It consists of a plain blue cotton gown, a white apron, large white turned-down collar, and a white muslin cap surrounding the face in the old style and tied under the chin with a large bow. The young girl probationers look very sweet and attractive in the cap, which has a tendency to heighten the beauty of a fresh young face while it seems singularly appropriate to the elderly women who have passed from active service to the Home of Rest, later provided.

Unlike their Roman Catholic sisters, the Kaiserswerth deaconesses were not fettered by a vow. Their vocation was to be the servants of Christ and the servants of the sick and poor. They could at any time return to their families if their services were needed, and were at liberty to marry, but not to remain in the hospital afterwards, as it was considered that the new ties would interfere with entire devotion to their work.

Pastor Fliedner was a man of social instincts and had himself married twice. His first wife lived only a short time, and the story of his second wooing is quaintly told in his journal. He went to Hamburg to ask Amalia Sieveking to take charge of a deaconess home. She was unable to comply with the request, but recommended in her place a young friend and pupil, Caroline Bertheau, who had been nursing in the Hamburg Hospital. The pastor was so pleased with the substitute that he offered her the choice of either taking charge of a deaconess home or becoming his wife. Caroline demurely elected to do both. They were married at once, and spent their honeymoon in Berlin for the purpose of establishing the first five deaconesses in the Charité Hospital, returning in due course to Kaiserswerth, where the young wife became the Deaconess Mother of the institution and the devoted helpmeet of her husband in all his after-work.

But to return to the training of the deaconesses. After the institution had become established in all its branches, a candidate decided on entering whether she wished to train as a teacher or as a nurse, and was enrolled in the Krankenschwestern or Lehrschwestern according to her choice. Each probationer goes through a course of practical housework. She learns to cook, sew, iron, and scrub by taking a share in the menial work of the hospital, and this fits her to be of real help when she comes to enter the homes of the poor. The probationer also has instruction in simple book-keeping, letter-writing, and reading aloud. After she has gone through the general course, she goes into particular training according to her choice. If she desires to become a nurse, she enters the surgical and medical wards of the hospital; and if a teacher, she trains in the kindergarten and the other schools.

The Kaiserswerth deaconesses receive no salaries, the primary idea being that they should give themselves to the work. They have free board and are supplied each year with two blue cotton gowns and two aprons, and every five years with a new blue woollen gown and a black alpaca apron for best wear. They receive at intervals new outdoor dress, which consists of long black cloaks and black bonnets which fit closely over the white cap. If a deaconess has private property, she retains the full control of it, and on her death it reverts to her nearest of kin unless she has otherwise disposed of it by will. Each deaconess is allowed a small sum for pocket money.

During the first ten years of the founding of Kaiserswerth Pastor Fliedner spread his system of deaconesses until he had established sixty nurses in twenty-five different centres, and calls were coming from all sides. In 1849 he resigned his pastorate in order to journey about establishing branch houses in different parts of the world. His first long journey was to the United States, to conduct deaconesses to Dr. Passavant’s German parish at Pittsburg; and the second was to Jerusalem, where he founded a “mother house” with four deaconesses on Mount Zion in a building given by the King of Prussia. This branch undertakes to nurse all sick persons irrespective of creed, and forms a training school for nurses in the East.

From Jerusalem he proceeded to Constantinople, established a branch there, and then proceeded to Alexandria, Beyrout, Smyrna, Bucharest, and other places. He had already started a deaconess home in London. The institutions spread rapidly through Germany, and to-day there is scarcely a town of any size in the Fatherland which has not its deaconess home which sends nurses to the poor without charge and supplies middle-class families at moderate fees. The last years of the pastor’s life were passed in bodily suffering, but he still kept his hand on the helm. His last work was to found at Kaiserswerth a Home of Rest for retired deaconesses. The good man was much cheered not only by the marvellous extension of his work—he left behind him a hundred houses attended by four hundred and thirty deaconesses—but at the fruit which seeds of his sowing had produced in the heart of the English lady who became the heroine of the Crimean War. It was with peculiar interest that he followed the work of Florence Nightingale in that campaign, for her deeds shed a reflected lustre on her Alma Mater.

On October 4th, 1864, Pastor Fliedner, to use Miss Nightingale’s words, “passed to his glorious rest.” Almost his last words were: “As I look back upon my life, I appreciate how full it has been of blessings; every heart-beat should have been gratitude and every breath praise.”

Commenting upon his work, Miss Nightingale made this characteristic summary: “Pastor Fliedner began his work with two beds under a roof, not with a castle in the air, and Kaiserswerth is now diffusing its blessings and its deaconesses over almost every Protestant land.”