ELIZABETH FEDDE'S DIARY, 1883-88 TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY BEULAH FOLKEDAHL "If you dare, can, and will undertake this work," read the challenge that Elizabeth Fedde received in Norway on Christmas Day, 1882, in a letter from her brother-in-law, Gabriel Fedde of Brooklyn, New York. It was a call to help the less fortunate Norwegian immigrants in their spiritual and temporal needs. Mrs. Christian B0rs, wife of the Norwegian consul , observing the distress of her countrymen, had consulted the pastor of the Norwegian Seamen's Mission Church in Brooklyn, had promised a yearly contribution of $150 toward the salary of a social worker, and had won the support of her husband, at whose request the letter was sent.1 Elizabeth Fedde did dare to undertake the work; she played a major role in establishing, in less than ten years, the Norwegian Lutheran Deaconesses' Home and Hospital in Brooklyn. In 1956 this 225-bed institution, a permanent monument to her labors, which had merged the previous year with Lutheran Hospital of Manhattan, was renamed Lutheran Medical Center . It had community clinics, a nursing school, an internship and residency program, and a disaster plan; mental health service, medical records library school, and chaplaincy training were added later. Elizabeth Fedde was born at Feda, Flekkefjord, Norway, December 25, 1850. When she was considering what was to be her life calling, deaconess work was suggested to her. "What is that? Do you mean those women we see on the streets wearing the peculiar dress? No, thank you, I shall not join them." But she could not forget the suggestion, and in 1873 she entered the deaconess mother house in Christiania, established only five years earlier. In 1878, with a younger 1 A copy of the letter of call is in the files of Lutheran Medical Center, Brooklyn . Elizabeth Fedde and her brother-in-law had the same name because they had lived on the same farm in Norway, and, as was the custom, the place, not the family, provided the surname. 170 ELIZABETH FEDDE'S DIARY 171 Sister, she was sent to Troms0, where for almost four years she pioneered in a new field under very primitive conditions.2 It was a region of three-month summers and nine-month winters, where nature was unrelenting in its harshness, disease was rampant, the hospital had scarcely basic equipment, and people were totally unaware of the Christian service of the deaconesses. After almost four years as a pioneer in this field, she returned home, shortly to go to America. The directors of the mother house in Christiania could not sponsor Sister Elizabeth's going to Brooklyn because the request had been sent directly to her; thus, in accepting the challenge she "ceased to be a Norwegian deaconess" and had no real claims on the institution.3 Nor was there much help from Sisters in America. Pastor Theodor Fliedner, who founded the modern diaconate at Kaiserswerth, Germany, in 1836, had in 1849 brought four Sisters to Pastor W. A. Passavan ťs Pittsburgh Infirmary, but the deaconess program there did not flourish, and the Philadelphia mother house was not established until later. Sister Elizabeth was to receive more help from the pastors in the Norwegian Seamen's Mission Church and in the local Lutheran church, which served the thousands of sailors who arrived in New York harbor each year and the some two thousand resident Norwegians . And, although later, when the problem arose as to which synod should sponsor Elizabeth's institution, she successfully contended that she had been called to help her countrymen and not any particular synod, her diary indicates a friendly relationship with the pastors and her dependence on them.4 She was to need assistance badly. New York was unlike Norway in climate, language, and economic life, and a From Elizabeth Fedde's "Autobiography"; the original manuscript is in the files of the medical center. Women who entered a deaconess mother house for training in nursing, Christian ethics, and social welfare received the title "Sister" from the beginning of the course. 8 Sister Superior Johanne Lyng0, Oslo, Norway, to the writer, June 10, 1958. 4 Nordisk tidende (Brooklyn), November 20, 1896...