In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER 8 Religious Nursing Orders of Canada: A Presence on All Western Frontiers Pauline Paul Most Canadians can identify a religious nursing order that has been involved in caring for their community. Many, however, do not realize the extent to which religious nursing orders played a leadership role in the development of nursing and health care services across Canada. Nursing sisters, as they will be generically referred to in this chapter, were often the first care providers on new frontiers and, although the number of sisters has been declining since the 1960s, a significant number of the health care institutions they created remain as evidence of their contribution to the development of Canada from coast to coast. This chapter undertakes to explore the legacy of religious nursing orders from 1760 to the present. But because this is such a huge task, it is impossible to do justice to all religious nursing orders and to explore their presence in all regions of our vast country. It was necessary to set limits and focus on specific geographical areas and religious orders. Because the role of nursing sisters on new frontiers is of particular interest, we chose to focus on western Canada. Similarly, since Roman Catholic religious nursing orders have been the most prevalent in Canada, they will occupy centre stage. The magnitude of the role played by these sisters is evident when examining statistics published in 1947: At that time, Roman Catholic sisters operated at least 146 hospitals , including 36 of the 66 large Canadian hospitals.1 In addition, because French-Canadian orders were prevalent in western Canada and operated most of the large Roman Catholic hospitals of that region, we will give primary emphasis to them. Although most orders who came to western Canada, and most of the orders that operated hospitals in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver, originated in Quebec, the contribution of these religious orders to the foundation of Quebec hospitals will not be our focus, since this subject has already been addressed in chapter 4. Rather, our purpose here is to explore how sisters from Quebec played a key role in spreading nursing across the West. By examining how major French-Canadian religious nursing orders spread across the country, creating impressive networks of hospitals and dispensaries , it is possible to shed light on the overall development of religious nursing in western Canada. The French-Canadian orders had in common with nursing sisters of all denominations a fundamental belief that helping others was an important calling, as well as the common experience of being for significant periods of time the main — if not the only — providers of health care services to the populations they served. We can say, then, that the experiences of French-Canadian nursing sisters are probably fairly representative of the experiences of all nursing sisters Figure 1 Sisters of Charity tending patients Tache Hospital, 4 St. Boniface, Manitoba 1926 Manitoba Archives, St. Boniface Collection-HospitalTache . Item #4 Negative 9367 in western Canada. It is also possible to say that the experiences of nursing sisters in the West were comparable to those of their counterparts in other regions of Canada; no matter where they were and when they devoted their lives to the care of others, nursing sisters faced certain common challenges related to geography , culture, and economics. At any given time in our past, nursing sisters have served Canadians of all origins across all regions of the country. This chapter, through an exploration of the experience of nursing sisters in the West, provides a snapshot of the leadership role Canadian sisters played in the development of nursing and health care services in our country. Setting the Stage: Canada from 1760 to 1899 By 1760 Roman Catholic religious nursing orders had already established a network of hospitals in the part of New France that was later to become the province of Quebec. After 1760, Quebec Roman Catholic nursing orders continued to grow under the new British rule. Their existence was further assured by the 1774 Act of Quebec, which, among other things, gave French North American people religious freedom.2 Without this freedom, nursing sisters would not have been able to pursue their activities and provide services that had no equivalent in other North American British colonies. It is important to recall that, at the time, organized nursing was practically non-existent in the English-speaking world, and that it would take another century before the first graduates from the British hospital nursing schools, subsidized by...

Share