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.