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Protestant Deaconess Motherhouses emerged as a German nursing organization in the nineteenth century to be later exported to many other countries including the United States. The motherhouse principle could not be simply transferred without being adapted to the situation prevailing in each of those countries. The essay investigates the conception and transformation of Protestant nursing by comparing a West German and American deaconess motherhouse each in their particular context. It shows that the deaconesses in the United States developed their own, more scientifically oriented understanding of nursing and were therefore more open to the rationalization of nursing than their West German counterpart.

This study deals with the reform of nursing education on a day-to-day level and exemplifies the dramatic change in the image of nursing in the 1960s, when the erstwhile religious calling was transformed into a modern-day female profession. The analysis is based on interviews with two different groups of nurses who were educated between the 1930s and 1960s. The first group is composed of the deaconesses of a Protestant mother-house in Hannover (Henriettenstiftung). The second group is formed by nurses who were noted for their important role in the professionalisation of nursing in West Germany. The methodology of this study draws on the experiences of the practice of oral history which reflects the actual context of the narratives, the problem of commemoration and the relationship between individual and collective memory. Nursing education, as late as the 1950s, was based on practical experience. The nursing students were responsible for a certain number of patients from the very first day of their training. Comparison of the different narratives shows that such an experience-based training principle was bound to a specific, family-like concept of nursing which was supported by the sisterhoods. This traditional system of nursing education changed essentially in the 1960s when knowledge based on experience lost a great deal of its meaning, while a theory-based training took preference. Furthermore, the regulation and fragmentation of nursing education increased significantly. The outcome was that continuity in caring for patients decreased dramatically in the 1960s and it became much more difficult to learn how to observe the sick and to demand confidence in dealing with patients. The reform of nursing education also had far-reaching consequences for the construction of everyday life in the wards as the students had previously undertaken a major part of the work.