The life of Florence Nightingale

by Sarah A. Tooley

Pope.

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.

PASTOR FLIEDNER, FOUNDER OF KAISERSWERTH.

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.