Friederike Fliedner

Friederike Fliedner (1800-1842), born Friederike Münster in Braunfels, was a German nurse and teacher who helped renew the Protestant deaconess ministry in the nineteenth century. The eldest of seven children, she ran her father's household after her mother died in 1816, and later trained to teach neglected children, working at the Düsselthal rescue institution for orphans from 1826 to 1828. In 1828 she married Theodor Fliedner, the founder of the Rhenish-Westphalian Prison Society, and joined him at Kaiserswerth. When the Kaiserswerth Deaconess Institute opened in 1836 she became its first superior, and from 1837 she led the house and was responsible for training the deaconesses as nurses. Together with her husband and Caroline Bertheau she developed the idea of the deaconess motherhouse, which carried trained nursing across Germany and which later influenced pioneers such as Florence Nightingale. She died at Kaiserswerth in 1842 while giving birth to her eleventh child.