It was at night that for the first time a poor forlorn creature came in answer to that prayer, and he and his wife led her in to the place prepared for her. Nine others followed, and, by the time the number had risen to twenty, a new building was ready for them with its own field and garden, and Fliedner’s wife, helped by Mademoiselle Gobel, who gave her services “all for love and nothing for reward,” had charge of the home, where many a one who, like the woman in the Gospel, “had been a great sinner” began to lead a new life and to follow Christ.
For the children of some of these women a kindergarten arose; but the work of all others on which the pastor’s heart was set was the training of women to nurse and tend the poor; for in his own parish, where there was much illness and ignorance, there was no one to do this. Three years after his earlier venture, in 1836 when Miss Nightingale in her far-away home was a girl of sixteen still more or less in the schoolroom, this new undertaking was begun, this quiet haven, from which her own great venture long afterwards took help and teaching, was built up by this German saint.
The failure of the velvet industry at Kaiserswerth, in the pastor’s first year, had left an empty factory which he turned into a hospital.
But when it was opened, the faith needed was much like the faith of Abraham when great blessing was promised to a son whom the world thought he would never possess; for the Deaconess Hospital, when the wards were fitted up by its pastor with “mended furniture and cracked earthenware,” had as yet no patients and no deaconesses.
There is, however, one essential of a good hospital which can be bought by labour as well as by money; and by hard work the hospital was kept admirably clean.
The first patient who knocked at its doors was a servant girl, and other patients followed so quickly that within the first year sixty patients were nursed there and seven nurses had entered as deaconess and probationers. All the deaconesses were to be over twenty-five, and though they entered for five years, they could leave at any moment. The code of rules drawn up by the pastor was very simple, and there were not any vows; but the form of admission was a solemn one and included the laying on of hands, while the pastor invoked the Threefold Name, saying: “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.”
It all had a kind of homely grace, even in outward things. The deaconesses wore a large white turned-down collar over a blue cotton gown, a white muslin cap tied on under the chin with a large bow, and a white apron—a dress so well suited to the work that young and old both looked more than usually sweet and womanly in it.
The story of how the deaconesses found a head, and Fliedner a second helper after the death of his first wife, reads rather like a Hans Andersen fairy tale.
He travelled to Hamburg to ask Amalie Sievekin to take charge of the Home, and as she could not do so, she advised him to go to her friend and pupil Caroline Berthean, who had had experience of nursing in the Hamburg Hospital.