For centuries the Roman Catholic community had trained and set apart holy women for ministering to the sick poor in their own homes, and had established hospitals supplied with the same type of nurse. A large number of these women were ladies of birth and breeding who worked for the good of their souls and the welfare of their Church, while all received proper education and training, and had abjured the world for a religious life. An excellent example of the work done by the nun-nurses is seen in the quaint old-world hospital of St. John, with which visitors to Bruges are familiar. It was one of the institutions visited by Miss Nightingale, and, religious differences apart, she viewed with profound admiration the beneficent work of the sisters. After pursuing her investigations from city to city, Miss Nightingale decided to take a course of instruction at the recently founded institution for deaconesses at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine. There a Protestant sisterhood were working on similar lines to Sisters of Charity, and had already done much to mitigate the poverty, sickness, and misery in their own district, and were beginning to extend their influence to other German towns. At Kaiserswerth the ideal system of trained sick nursing which Miss Nightingale had been forming in her own mind was an accomplished fact. CHAPTER VI _FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE’S ALMA MATER AND ITS FOUNDER_ Enrolled a Deaconess at Kaiserswerth--Paster Fliedner--His Early Life--Becomes Pastor at Kaiserswerth--Interest in Prison Reform--Starts a Small Penitentiary for Discharged Female Prisoners--Founds a School and the Deaconess Hospital--Rules for Deaconesses--Marvellous Extension of his Work--His Death--Miss Nightingale’s Tribute. Just precepts thus from great examples given, She drew from them what they derived from Heaven. 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. [Illustration: 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.