Eschew Prospectuses; they're the devil, and make one sick. It is like making out a bill of fare when you have not a single pound of meat. What do the cookery books say? First catch your hare. All the instances on the Continent have begun in one of two ways. At Kaiserswerth, a clergyman and his wife have begun, not with a Prospectus, but with a couple of hospital beds, and have offered, not an advertisement, but a home to young women willing to come. At Berne, a Mdlle. Würstenberger, a woman of rank and education, goes to Kaiserswerth to learn, and her friend to Strassburg. They return and open a hospital with two rooms, increase their funds, others join them and are taught by them.… To publish first is as bad a practical bull as is the name of the Prospective Review.
A few years were to pass, and Florence Nightingale herself was to begin her work in the world not with a programme, but with a deed.
The institutions of Kaiserswerth, when she was there in 1851, were still on a comparatively modest scale. They comprised, as she enumerates them, a Hospital (with 100 beds), an Infant School, a Penitentiary (with 12 inmates), an Orphan Asylum, and a Normal School for schoolmistresses. There were in all 116 deaconesses, of whom 94 were “consecrated,” the remainder being still on probation. The “consecration” consisted only of “a solemn blessing in the Church, without vows of any kind.” Of the 116 deaconesses, 67 were on service in other parts of Germany, or abroad; the rest were engaged in working the various institutions at Kaiserswerth itself. After six months' trial they received a modest salary, just enough to provide their clothes. There was no other reward, except that the Mother House stood open to receive those who might fall ill or become infirm in its service. Everything was clean and well ordered, but there was no luxury; the board was simple to the verge of roughness. The place was pervaded by two notes. It was a place of training, and a place of consecrated service. The training was both in practice and by precept. Every week the pastor gave a conversational lecture to the deaconesses, finding out from each the difficulties she might have experienced in her work, and suggesting how they could best be met. The education of the young, the ministration of the sick, the art of district visiting, the yet more difficult work of rescue and reformation, all were taught.
In such a place as this, Florence Nightingale found by actual experience, as already she had learnt to expect from reading the reports, the realization in some degree of her most earnest desires. The training in nursing was, it is true, not particularly good; it fell far short of the professional standard which the Nightingale School was afterwards to set up. She objected strongly in later years to current statements that her own training was confined to Kaiserswerth. “The nursing there,” she wrote, “was nil. The hygiene horrible. The hospital was certainly the worst part of Kaiserswerth. I took all the training that was to be had—there was none to be had in England, but Kaiserswerth was far from having trained me.” On the other hand “the tone was excellent, admirable. And Pastor Fliedner's addresses were the very best I ever heard. The penitentiary out-door work and vegetable gardening under a very capable Sister were excellently adapted to the case. And Pastor Fliedner's solemn and reverential teaching to us of the sad events of hospital life was what I have never heard in England.”[56] But here, at Kaiserswerth, Miss Nightingale found “a better life for women,” a scope for the exercise of “morally active” powers. And here, though the field was limited, was provided in some sort the training which alone could fit women for larger responsibilities elsewhere. Here was “the service of man” organized as “the service of God”; here was opportunity for the Dedicated Life, as she had found it also in the Trinità de' Monti.
Her manner of life at Kaiserswerth and her joy in it were told in letters to her mother:—
On Sunday I took the sick boys a long walk along the Rhine;[112] two Sisters were with me to help me to keep order. They were all in ecstasies with the beauty of the scenery, and really I thought it very fine too in its way—the broad mass of waters flowing ever on slowly and calmly to their destination, and all that unvarying horizon—so like the slow, calm, earnest, meditative German character.
The world here fills my life with interest, and strengthens me in body and mind. I succeeded directly to an office, and am now in another, so that until yesterday I never had time even to send my things to the wash. We have ten minutes for each of our meals, of which we have four. We get up at 5; breakfast ¼ before 6. The patients dine at 11; the Sisters at 12. We drink tea (i.e. a drink made of ground rye) between 2 and 3, and sup at 7. We have two ryes and two broths—ryes at 6 and 3, broths at 12 and 7; bread at the two former, vegetables at 12. Several evenings in the week we collect in the Great Hall for a Bible lesson. The Pastor sent for me once to give me some of his unexampled instructions; the man's wisdom and knowledge of human nature is wonderful; he has an instinctive acquaintance with every character in his place. Except that once I have only seen him in his rounds.
The operation to which Mrs. Bracebridge alludes was an amputation at which I was present, but which I did not mention to——, knowing that she would see no more in my interest in it than the pleasure dirty boys have in playing in the puddles about a butcher's shop. I find the deepest interest in everything here, and am so well in body and mind. This is Life. Now I know what it is to live and to love life, and really I should be sorry now to leave life. I know you will be glad to hear this, dearest Mum. God has indeed made life rich in interests and blessings, and I wish for no other earth, no other world but this.
The room in which Miss Nightingale slept during her residence at Kaiserswerth was in the Orphan Asylum. She took her meals with the Deaconesses. The Spartan severity, but no less the beautiful spirit of the place, were clear in her recollection nearly half a century later. In 1897 the authorities of the British Museum applied to her for a copy of the pamphlet on Kaiserswerth which she had printed in 1851. The pencilled note which she sent with a torn copy of the pamphlet, the only one she could find, is preserved in the Museum Library. “I was twice in training there myself,” she wrote (September 24, 1897). “Of course since then, Hospital and District nursing have made giant strides. Indeed District nursing has been invented. But never have I met with a higher tone, a purer devotion, than there. There was no neglect. It was the more remarkable because many of the Deaconesses had been only peasants—none were gentlewomen (when I was there). The food was poor. No coffee but bean-coffee. No luxury; but cleanliness.” Pastor Fliedner told a visitor to Kaiserswerth that “no person had ever passed so distinguished an examination, or shown herself so thoroughly mistress of all she had to learn, as Miss Nightingale.”[57]