"Mère Marie de St. Ignace, a young Superior, became the first woman missionary ever to set foot on heathen soil, and the first trained nurse to reach North America.
AMERICA'S FIRST NURSES worked with the Huron Indians. If one could mix a chronic case of scrofula, a perpetually hungry belly, a whine, innumerable lice, and smoke blindness with winter scurvy, a red skin, and a hair cut like a scrubbing brush, there would be a perfect specimen of a Quebec Huron of those days.
On August I, I639, three Hospitalières of the Order of St. Augustine were welcomed to the New World by a Te Deum and a smallpox epidemic. During the following winter, they kept open a little hospital which had been built by Marie de Wignerod, Duchesse d'Aiguillon and niece of the famous Cardinal Richelieu. She was one of Vincent de Paul's Ladies of Charity.
[PAVEY, AGNES E.: The Story of the Growth of Nursing. Faber and Faber, 1938, p. 218.]
Before the autumn was well advanced, the Sister had so many Huron patients that the small building was overflowing and the malades had to be laid out in sardine fashion on the floors, so close together that the three attendants had to step over them as they went about their various duties which included surgery, pharmacy, diagnosis, dish-washing, laundry, cooking, and fire-building.
Marie died from the effects of overwork and privation in I646. She had been the first of the seven missionaries to step from the dirty little codfish boat on that famous first of August I639. She left no relic for us to honor. Ex-cept for the clothing in which she was buried, all her garments were taken by her survivors who were themselves always short of clothing."
Ever so slightly reordered from:
From Tepee to Tower: Hôtel Dieu de Québec, 1639-1939
Source: The American Journal of Nursing, Vol. 39, No. 8 (Aug., 1939), pp. 843-846Published by: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
