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CHAPTER 4 Healing the Body and Saving the Soul: Nursing Sisters and the First Catholic Hospitals in Quebec (1639-1880) Brigitte Violette 3 genesis of a large part of the hospital netork in Quebec and, indeed, across Canada mnot be separated from the history of female religious orders.1 For more than three centuries, over 50 religious orders were associated with development of the Catholic hospital network across Canada and the delivery of care to patients inspired by an age-old caregiving philosophy.2 Behind the foundation of these establishments were conceptions of the human being, health, and illness based on Christian faith. From this conception flowed modes of intervention in which the nursing sisters played a paramount role. The funding and management of the institutions , and the organization of care within them, were based on practices in which charity was deemed essential.3 In this chapter, I will attempt to show how the traditional conception of the hospital enabled nursing sisters to play a central role in organizing and delivering health care within the Quebec hospital system for two centuries. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, a shift took place in which the medical establishment was constituted as the sole repository of medical science and guardian of health; this changed mentality caused an upheaval in the hospital sector and imposed new ways of doing things. The consequent rise of the medical profession within hospital organizations was to lead to the medicalization of hospitals and the gradual imposition of the biomedical model of care. This new model led to a subjugation of the nuns that, in the end, would cause them to lose control of their centuries-old institutions in favour of state-run medicine. The literature includes works on the history of hospitals, as well as publications on specific aspects of health or public health and monographs devoted to certain religious orders. However, research has not yet advanced to the point where we have an overall view of the development of the hospital system and an account of the role assumed by the many religious orders that were associated with it.4 In fact, the history of religious orders working in the health care field in Quebec5 and across Canada remains to be written. Because of the embryonic state of the research in this area, this chapter is based on documentation that highlights the work of the Augustinian Nuns of Mercy and the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph. The chronological framework extends from the foundation of the Hotel-Dieu de Quebec, the first hospital in North America north of Mexico, in 1639,to tne opening of Notre-Dame Hospital in Montreal in 1880; the latter, owned by a lay corporation, was managed by a board of directors from which nuns were excluded, a first in the Catholic hospital network.6 T Figure i "Ex-voto of the Women's Ward" i8th century Collection des Hospitalieres de Saint-Joseph de 1'Hotel-Dieu de Montreal Establishment of a Centuries-Old Tradition and the Nuns' Place in the Hospital System: 1639-1840 The presence of religious orders in the hospital sector can be understood only through the traditional function of the hospital in Christianity. Arising from the need to do charitable works, most hospitals hosted, indiscriminately, pilgrims, travellers, the indigent, ill and infirm people, old people, orphans, widows and widowers, and others, as an embodiment of "the direct image of the Crucified, whose sufferings conferred upon them a redemptive value of cooperation."7 Thus, the hospital was a religious space in terms of both its origins and its purpose. It was configured essentially in the perspective of salvation — salvation of the weak and suffering people whom it took in, but also of those who worked there, since charity had a redemptive value for those who practised it. The nuns thus embodied the words of Christ: "I was hungry and ye gave me to eat; I was thirsty and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me... inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me."8 It was in these words that the foundation of works of mercy — the Hotels-Dieu and general hospitals — by the religious nursing orders resided. In the late seventeenth century, the towns of Quebec, Trois-Rivieres, and Montreal already had a Hotel-Dieu, and the two largest towns, Quebec...

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