Ferard, Elizabeth Catherine

English deaconess. Inspired by the Lutheran Kaiserwerth community in Germany, where the deaconess order or diaconate, a nursing order, had been revived with the establishment of the first Protestant hospital (1836), she pioneered the work of the order within the Church of England. She founded a house in London in 1861, and was ‘set apart’ as a deaconess in 1862. By 1873 the bishops had drawn up guidelines for deaconesses in the church at large.

Ferard visited the Kaiserwerth community in 1858, and offered to promote the order in England. She undertook a common rule of life with two companions in a house near Kings Cross in 1861 and Archibald Campbell Tait, bishop of London, made her a deaconess the following year. Although she resigned as leader in 1873, due to ill health, her ideas had already been adopted by other dioceses.