[They all have a look at me in a friendly way: relationships between patients and nurses in the hospital of Saarbruck in the middle of the 19th century].

In the course of the nineteenth century, Saarbruck developed from a small provincial town to the centre of a large region rapidly becoming industrialised. The traditional civil hospital underwent a fundamental change: from a residence for the old, the poor, and the neglected it became a modern hospital intended to restore health and fitness to the growing number of young working people in the region. To help the hospital meet its new aims, Reverend Fliedner of the Protestant Deaconesses' Institution in Kaiserswerth on the Rhine sent two young deaconesses to the hospital in Saarbruck. Expecting to work as a nurse and housekeeper, the two inexperienced and under-trained women were virtually overwhelmed by what they encountered. Their work required very hard physical work, with very little or no assistance. This study is based on the series of letters of appeal the deaconesses sent to Kaiserswerth, which depict in great detail the conditions of the hospital during the transition period. Different groups of inmates can be distinguished: old and poor patients representing hospital's traditional function; journeymen and domestic servants who are far from home and no longer under their employers' care, and miners with rather severe injuries. Miners constitute the prototype of the new industrial working class, as the mining industry was by far the most important sector of the developing economy. All groups benefited from the deaconesses' zeal to establish new standards of cleanliness and nutrition, not to mention the beginning of professional medical care. On the other hand, they have to submit to middle class expectations and behaviour. For instance, heman miners were expected to follow orders from female nurses, and domestic servants afflicted with scabies or venereal disease were expected to adopt new standards of moral and orderly demeanour. Resistance was mainly passive, consisting of paying lip service to the rules, taking small liberties, and reverting to the old style after dismissal. Conflicts arose only in certain situations injured Catholic miners, or when patients clung obstinately to their liquor. On the whole, the hospital functioned quite smoothly, at least after the initial difficulties were overcome and the deaconesses gained experience and self-confidence.