1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910812879403321

Autore

Nelson Sioban

Titolo

Say Little, Do Much : Nursing, Nuns, and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century / / Sioban Nelson

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia : , : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2010]

©2001

ISBN

1-283-21188-2

9786613211880

0-8122-0290-2

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (244 p.)

Collana

Studies in Health, Illness, and Caregiving

Disciplina

610.73/09

Soggetti

Nursing - Religious aspects - Christianity

Monastic and religious life of women

Hospitals

Sisterhoods

Caring - Religious aspects - Christianity

Catholicism - history

History of Nursing

History, 19th Century

Hospitals - history

Women - history

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (pages 213-225) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Chapter 1. "Say Little, Do Much" -- Chapter 2. Martha's Turn -- Chapter 3. Free Enterprise and Resourcefulness -- Chapter 4. Behind Enemy Lines -- Chapter 5. At the Margins of the Empire -- Chapter 6. Frontier: "The Means to Begin Are None" -- Chapter 7. Crossing the Confessional Divide -- Chapter 8. The Twentieth Century -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

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.