Amanda Viger: Spiritual Healer to New Brunswick’s Leprosy Victims, 1845–1906 by Mary Jane Losier (review)

716 The Canadian Historical Review Lemieux, Marius Barbeau, and Carmen Roy, among others, I doubt it applies to the entire country. Personally, I hoped for a more critical biography that could elucidate Creighton's place in regional consciousness (McKay's concern) or Canadian folklore scholarship (Tye's concern). Simply following a chronology of Creighton's life and ofthe events she herself considered significant does not clarify the issues. But Creighton wrote A Life chronologically and, given how closely Croft worked with her, it's not surprising he chose this mode. PAULINE GREENHILL University ofWinnipeg Amanda Viger: Spiritual Healer to New Brunswick's Leprosy Victims, 1845-1906. MARY JANE LOSIER. Halifax: Nimbus Publishing 1999· Pp. 176, illus. 16.95 Since the publication of Marta Danylewycz's groundbreaking volume, Taking the Veil, the historiography on Canadian women religious has steadily expanded. Much ofthis work focuses disproportionately on the story of Quebec's sister-teachers. Only recently have English-Canadian historians shed their reluctance to incorporate the study ofwomen and religion into mainstream scholarship. As the ground is being broken, a rich and varied terrain beckons. Mary Jane Losier's book adds a human dimension to the often faceless blur of black robes and veils. In this biography, she traces the evolution ofthe spirited Quebec-born Amanda Viger, who was propelled towards a religious vocation by French Canada's aggressive mid- .nineteenth-century Catholicism. Within the Religious Hospitallers of St Joseph, she found a fertile field for realizing everlasting salvation and a professional career. Her achievements were remarkable in an era when women's work was marginalized; in fact, they are remarkable by any standard. Viger helped establish a foundation of hospitallers, a leper hospital, school, and orphanage. She became a mother superior at age thirty and was elected to this office no fewer than seven times. In the first four chapters, Losier sets the scene for the main stage of Viger's most celebrated labours - the Tracadie lazaretto. She recycles much ofthe detail that appeared in her earlier work, Children ofLazarus, although this time she is less inclined to strive for melodramatic effect. She generates admiration for the Sisters, who warded offhomesickness, sexual frustration, and exhaustion and braved the encroachments of meddlesome clerics, the local elite, and provincial and federal politicians. Viger, however, stands out as the backbone of the community. She was Book Reviews 717 admired as a consummate administrator and revered as a 'healer' among a widespread clientele outside the lazaretto. Losier also takes the reader behind the scenes in r9or-2, when this religious community became the battleground of a ruinous power struggle. This unseemly contretemps necessitated the intervention of the apostolic delegate and served as a discordant finale to Amanda Viger's long association with the Tracadie Hotel-Dieu. She was reassigned to the Arthabaska Hotel-Dieu, where she finished out her career battling cancer and institutional debt. According to Losier, death did not erase Viger's impact. Her proud legacy was a strong heritage ofreligious careers for Acadian women. Losier's biography of Viger is a welcome addition to the historiography ofwomen religious who tested gendered boundaries. However, her account offers minimal contextual analysis. There are some surprising omissions in her bibliography: no mention is made of the work by Elizabeth Smyth, Elisabeth Lacelle, Nicole Laurin, or Danielle Juteau. Even Elizabeth Muir and Marilyn Fardig Whiteley's Changing Roles of Women within the Christian Church in Canada goes unacknowledged, although this anthology includes an article dealing specifically with the Tracadie Religious Hospitallers of St Joseph. Losier's biography leaves some important questions unanswered. Did Viger exemplify the leprophilia of the nineteenth century, which embraced leprosy work as the ideal embodiment of the 'Christ-life'? For women, this field of activity also served as a means to fulfil social expectations of female service and self-sacrifice. This is what drove Kate Marsden, a British nurse who laboured among Siberia's leprosy victims, to send out the clarion call to the sisterhood: 'This leprosy work is essentially woman's work.' Clearly Viger's commitment to the care of leprosy victims should be examined within the wider matrix of nineteenth-century religious thought and gender ideologies. Losier provides much fascinating...