Jeanne Mance
| Jeanne Mance | |
|---|---|
Statue at the foot of Maisonneuve Monument
|
|
| Born |
November 12, 1606 Langres, Haute-Marne |
| Died | June 18, 1673 (aged 66) Montréal |
| Cause of death | Illness |
| Occupation | Nurse |
| Employer | Société Notre-Dame de Montréal |
| Known for |
Founding of Montreal Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal |
| Parent(s) | Catherine Émonnot Charles Mance |
Jeanne Mance (November 12, 1606 – June 18, 1673) was a French nurse and settler of New France. She arrived in New France two years after the Ursuline nuns came to Quebec. Among the founders of Montreal, Canada, in 1642, she established its first hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, in 1645. She returned twice to France to seek financial support for the hospital. After providing most of the care directly for years, in 1657 she recruited three sisters of the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph, and continued to direct operations of the hospital.
Jeanne Mance was born into a bourgeois family in Langres, in Haute-Marne, France. She was the daughter of Catherine Émonnot and Charles Mance, a prosecutor for the king in Langres, an important diocese in the northern Burgundy. After her mother died prematurely, Jeanne cared for eleven brothers and sisters. She went on to care for victims of the Thirty Years War and the plague.
At age 34, while on a pilgrimage to Troyes in Champagne, Mance discovered her missionary calling. She decided to go to New France in North America, then in the first stages of colonization by the French. She was supported by Anne of Austria, the wife of King Louis XIII, and by the Jesuits.
Mance was a member of the Society of Our Lady of Montreal; its goal was to convert the natives and found a hospital in Montreal similar to the one in Quebec.
Charles Lallemant recruited Jeanne Mance for the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal. Mance embarked from La Rochelle on May 9, 1641, on a crossing of the Atlantic that took three months. After wintering in Quebec, she and Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve arrived at the Island of Montreal in the spring of 1642. They founded the new city on May 17, 1642, on land granted by the Governor. That same year Mance began operating a hospital in her home.
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