Say Little, Do Much

Nursing, Nuns, and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century

Sioban Nelson

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780812217834
• eBook ISBN:
  9780812202908
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

In the nineteenth century, more than a third of American hospitals were established and run by women with religious vocations. In Say Little, Do Much, Sioban Nelson casts light on the work of these women's religious communities. According to Nelson, the popular view that nursing invented itself in the second half of the nineteenth century is historically inaccurate and dismissive of the major advances in the care of the sick as a serious and skilled activity, an activity that originated in seventeenth-century France with Vincent de Paul's Daughters of Charity.In this comparative, contextual, and critical work, Nelson demonstrates how modern nursing developed from the complex interplay of the Catholic emancipation in Britain and Ireland, the resurgence of the Irish Church, the Irish diaspora, and the mass migrations of the German, Italian, and Polish Catholic communities to the previously Protestant strongholds of North America and mainland Britain. In particular, Nelson follows the nursing Daughters of Charity through the French Revolution and the Second Empire, documenting the relationship that developed between the French nursing orders and the Irish Catholic Church during this period. This relationship, she argues, was to have major significance for the development of nursing in the English-speaking world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1. "Say Little, Do Much": Veils of Invisibility–Nursing Nuns
• Chapter 2. Martha's Turn: Vowed Women and Virtuous Work
• Chapter 3. Free Enterprise and Resourcefulness: An American Success Story–The Daughters of Charity in the Northeast
• Chapter 4. Behind Enemy Lines: Religious Nursing in England–Conflicts and Solutions
• Chapter 5. At the Margins of the Empire: Religious Wars in the Hospital Wards of Colonial Sydney
• Chapter 6. Frontier: "The Means to Begin Are None"
• Chapter 7. Crossing the Confessional Divide: German Catholic and Protestant Nurses
• Chapter 8. The Twentieth Century: "Every Day Life Got Smaller"
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgrnents