FLIEDNER, THEODOR. - Founder of the Deaconess Institute in the Evangelical churches, born at Eppstein (Nassau) on 21 Jan. 1800, died at Kaiserswerth on 4 Oct. 1864. A Lutheran pastor at Kaiserswerth, during a fundraising journey to aid his impoverished parish, he had the opportunity to study social works in the Netherlands (1823) and in England (1824), particularly those concerned with released prisoners and fallen young women seeking repentance.
Upon his return home, on 18 June 1826, he organized in Düsseldorf a "Society for Prison Visitation." In 1833, in a gazebo in his own garden, he began—amid widespread hostility—a shelter for released prisoners who had been sold into servitude. In the same gazebo, three years later, he opened a children’s asylum and then a school to train teachers for II. In 1836, reviving within Lutheran Protestantism the ancient female diaconate, he founded the Kaiserswerth Deaconess House, whose members were to care for the sick, tend orphans, and instruct the young.