_ENTERS KAISERSWERTH: A PLEA FOR DEACONESSES_
An Interesting Letter--Description of Miss Nightingale when she
entered Kaiserswerth--Testimonies to her Popularity--Impressive
Farewell to Pastor Fliedner.
The travelled mind is the catholic mind educated from exclusiveness
and egotism.--A. BRONSON ALCOTT.
When Florence Nightingale entered the Deaconess Hospital at
Kaiserswerth, the institution, if we count the first primitive
penitentiary, had been in existence sixteen years. It already
consisted of a hospital and training home for deaconesses, a seminary
for infant-school teachers, a kindergarten, an orphan asylum, and a
penitentiary, but was small compared with the extensive settlement of
to-day. It was managed on very simple and primitive lines, and the
nurses came almost entirely from the peasant class. The fashion of
“lady” nurses was practically unknown. Deaconess Reichardt, the first
sister enrolled in the institution, was still there at the time of
Miss Nightingale’s sojourn.
An interesting bit of autobiography regarding her Kaiserswerth days is
given by Miss Nightingale in a letter preserved by the authorities of
the British Museum. The letter was sent in reply to their request for
a copy of the little history of Kaiserswerth which Miss Nightingale
published after her return from the institution, and was hastily
written in pencil. It is dated September 24th, 1897, from her house 10,
South Street, Park Lane, and runs as follows:--
“MESSRS. DUBAU,--
“A gentleman called here yesterday from you, asking for a copy of
my _Kaiserswerth_ for, I believe, the British Museum.
“Since yesterday, a search has been instituted--but only two copies
have been found, and one of those is torn and dirty. I send you
the least bad-looking. You will see the date is 1851, and after
the copies then printed were given away, I don’t think I have ever
thought of it.
“I was twice in training there myself. Of course, since then
hospital and district nursing have made great strides. Indeed,
district nursing has been invented.
“But never have I met with a higher love, 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.
“FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.”
One can imagine the flutter of excitement amongst the good simple
deaconesses as they flitted about in their blue cotton gowns, white
aprons, and prim muslin caps when it was known that an English lady
of wealth and position had come to study amongst them. That such a
woman should voluntarily undertake the duties of a hospital nurse,
tending the sick poor with her own delicate hands, was at that time
almost unprecedented. But the “Fraulein Nightingale” was quickly at
home amongst her fellow-nurses and eager to learn all that the more
experienced could teach her. She took both day and night nursing and
entered into all branches of work. Garbed in the simple nurse’s dress
she moved through the wards of the hospital carrying the charm of her
presence from bed to bed, as she was later to do at Scutari. Was there
a difficult case to attend or an operation to be performed, the English
Fraulein was sure to be on the scene.
At this period Miss Nightingale was in the strength and beauty of her
early womanhood. She was tall, slight, and graceful, with abundance
of brown hair neatly arranged on either side her high broad forehead,
and had penetrating grey-blue eyes and a mouth which though firm
indicated a sense of humour. The deaconesses, with whom she could
talk in their own language, found her a diverting companion, for she
had a sharp incisive wit, a certain homely shrewdness of expression,
and a knowledge acquired not only from a superior education, but
from a good experience of foreign travel. Above everything else she
was distinguished by the power of adapting herself to circumstances,
and she settled down to the humble fare and simple routine of life
at Kaiserswerth as easily as though she had never known the refined
luxuries of her father’s house. It is small wonder that the sweet old
faces of the retired deaconesses, living out the last spell of life
in the Kaiserswerth Home of Rest, light up with smiles to-day at the
mention of the “Fraulein Nightingale.” Some can recall her gracious
kindly presence amongst them, and all feel a community of satisfaction
that her honoured name is enrolled among the sisterhood.
Sister Agnes Jones, the devoted and famous nurse of Liverpool, was
at Kaiserswerth in 1860, and records the impression which Miss
Nightingale’s personality had left on the deaconesses. She wrote in
a letter to a friend: “Their love for Miss Nightingale is so great;
she was only a few months there, but they so long to see her again. I
was asking much about her; such a loving and lovely womanly character
hers must be, and so religious. Sister S. told me many of the sick
remembered much of her teaching, and some died happily, blessing her
for having led them to Jesus.”
Although training in hospital work was Miss Nightingale’s primary
object in going to Kaiserswerth, she was deeply interested in all
Pastor Fliedner’s schemes for helping the poor in his parish, and did
a good deal of what in these days would be termed “district visiting,”
along with Frau Fliedner. She also took a keen interest in the school
and the teachers’ seminary, and formed a warm friendship with Henrietta
Frickenhaus, the first schoolmistress at Kaiserswerth, who was still
in charge of the seminary, and had at that time trained four hundred
candidates.
Pastor Fliedner had given up parish work to travel abroad and found
deaconess institutions in various towns at the time when Miss
Nightingale first came to Kaiserswerth, but they occasionally met, and
during the latter part of her residence he was at home and took, as may
be readily imagined, a deep interest in the training of so brilliant
and distinguished a pupil. Mr. Sidney Herbert visited Kaiserswerth
during Miss Nightingale’s probation, and had therefore an opportunity
of seeing the efficient training of the lady who was later to be his
honoured coadjutor in hospital and nursing reforms.
A very impressive scene took place when Florence Nightingale left
Kaiserswerth. The present head of the institution, Pastor Düsselhoff,
tells me that his mother, the eldest daughter of Pastor Fliedner,
vividly recalls the scene to-day. After bidding good-bye to the
deaconesses, Miss Nightingale bent her head to the pastor and asked
for his blessing. With hands resting on her head, and face upturned to
heaven, he prayed that her sojourn at Kaiserswerth might bear precious
fruit and her great powers be dedicated to the service of humanity.
Then, repeating his usual formula--“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”--he sent her forth dedicated to the service of the sick and
suffering. Little did he think what the magnitude of that service was
to be. Teacher and pupil were not destined to meet again, but the good
pastor lived to hear the name of Florence Nightingale resound through
the world.
After Miss Nightingale’s return home from her second sojourn at
Kaiserswerth, she published in 1851 a booklet on the institution,
and in the introduction gives some excellent advice to the girls of
the time. Her remarks may seem a little out of date to-day, but are
interesting as showing the desire for useful work which was beginning
to actuate women of the leisured classes and which needed to be
directed into fitting channels. There was then the great cry of the
untrained. Women were longing for occupation, but few had received
definite courses of training.
Miss Nightingale was at this period a pioneer of her sex and a
decidedly “advanced” woman, but the desire for freedom of action was
tempered by a naturally well-balanced nature. She put forward the plea
on women’s behalf that they should be encouraged to seek occupation
and properly trained for their work. In _Kaiserswerth_ she deals
more particularly with the vocation of a nurse or deaconess, but as
a prelude to the little work she refers to the position of women in
her own century. There is “an old legend,” she writes, “that the
nineteenth century is to be the century of women,” but she thinks that
up to the present (1851) it has not been theirs. She magnanimously
exempts man from blame. The fault, has not been his, for “in no
country has woman been given such freedom to cultivate her powers” as
in England. “She [woman] is no longer called pedantic if her powers
appear in conversation. The authoress is courted not shunned.” Women,
she thinks, have made extraordinary intellectual development, but
as human beings cannot move two feet at once, except they jump, so
while the intellectual foot of woman has made a step in advance, the
practical foot has remained behind. “Woman,” says Miss Nightingale,
“stands askew. Her education for action has not kept pace with her
education for acquirement. The woman of the eighteenth century was
perhaps happier, when practice and theory were on a par, than her more
cultivated sister of the nineteenth century. The latter wishes, but
does not know how to do many things! The former, what she wished at
least _that_ she could do.”
It appears that when Miss Nightingale was a young woman, the fashion
for extolling the single girl as against her sister who had entered
the bonds of matrimony was coming into vogue, but on this point our
heroine was racily sincere. “It has become of late the fashion,” she
says, “to cry up ‘old maids,’ to inveigh against regarding marriage as
the vocation of all women, to declare that a single life is as happy as
a married one, if people would but think so. So is the air as good an
element for fish as the water, if they did but know how to live in it.
Show us _how_ to be single and we will agree. But hitherto we have not
found that young Englishwomen have been convinced. And we must confess
that, _in the present state of things_, their horror of being ‘old
maids’ seems justified ... a life without love, and an activity without
an aim, is horrible in idea and wearisome in reality.”
Miss Nightingale does not touch on the point that the disparity between
the numbers of the sexes makes singleness not a choice but a necessity
to many women, and that in the interests of those who must remain
unwed, training for a definite calling in life should be given to girls
as well as to boys.
She goes on to speak of the longing of women for work and the _ennui_
which results from the lack of it, and draws the picture of five or six
daughters living in well-to-do houses with no other occupation than
taking a class in a Sunday-school and of the middle-class girls who
become burdensome to fathers and brothers.
She expends some characteristic witticisms on the young ladies who try
to drive away _ennui_ by a little parish visiting, and because of their
want of knowledge only succeed in demoralising the poor. In evidence
of this, Miss Nightingale tells the story that one day on entering a
cottage which was usually neat and tidy she found everything upside
down.
“La! now! why, miss,” said the cottage woman at her visitor’s look of
astonishment, “when the district-visiting ladies comes, if we didn’t
put everything topsy-turvy they would not give us anything.”
“To be able to visit _well_,” says Miss Nightingale, commenting upon
the foregoing incident, “is one of the rarest accomplishments. But when
attained, what a blessing to both visitors and visited!”
These remarks in regard to the work of women were by way of preliminary
to introducing the subject of deaconesses. Miss Nightingale had
returned from Kaiserswerth full of enthusiasm for the vocation of
trained nurse and visitor to the poor, and was endeavouring to
introduce the then highly novel subject to her young countrywomen
as a way of getting rid of listlessness and _ennui_. That she felt
the ground to be dangerous is shown by the detailed account of the
connection of the office of a deaconess with the early Christian
Church, which she deemed it necessary to give in order to allay the
Protestant fear that a deaconess was a nun in disguise.
In these days, when women are actively employed in Church work and
philanthropy, and when their assistance is welcomed by the clergy in
parishes all over the land, it seems strange to find how cautiously
Miss Nightingale recommended the office of deaconess. She labours
through scholastic arguments and cites the Fathers. St. Chrysostom
speaks of forty deaconesses at work in Constantinople in the fourth
century. Holy women of the order worked amongst the Waldensian,
Bohemian and Moravian Brotherhoods. Luther complained of the lack of
deaconesses in his neighbourhood, adding, “Women have especial graces
to alleviate woe, and the words of women move the human being more than
those of men.” Under Queen Elizabeth, deaconesses were instituted into
the Protestant Church during public service. The Pilgrim Fathers when
first driven to Amsterdam and Leyden carried their deaconesses with
them, and Miss Nightingale cites the improving example of the Amsterdam
deaconess who sat in her place at church with a little birchen rod in
her hand to correct the children, and relates how she called upon the
young maidens for their services, when they were sick, and she was
“obeyed like a mother in Israel.”
She considers it clearly proved that before the establishment of the
order of sisters of mercy by St. Vincent de Paul in 1633, the office
of deaconess had been recognised by all divisions of Christians, and
was therefore not borrowed from the Roman Catholic Church. The reason
why such sisterhoods had not flourished among Protestants was owing
to the lack of preparatory schools and training homes. This want had
been supplied at the Kaiserswerth institution, and she proceeds to
give a history of its foundation and growth. There she had found her
ideal, and for the next few years her life was devoted to philanthropic
and religious work. Military nursing had not as yet dawned upon her
horizon.