Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. During the eighteenth century, orders of nursing sisters took on an expanded role in the rural areas of Brittany.
This article explores the impact of religious change on the medical activities of these women. While limits were placed on the medical practice of unlicensed individuals, areas of new opportunity for nuns as charitable practitioners were created by devout nobles throughout the eighteenth century. These nuns provided comprehensive care for the sick poor on their patrons' estates, acting not only as nurses, but also in lieu of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries.
This article argues that the medical knowledge and expertise of these sisters from the nursing orders were highly valued by the elites of early modern Brittany. In , the French crown issued an ordinance for the province of Brittany clarifying under what conditions it would pay for medical help to assist in rural parishes struck by epidemics.
The following May, the chief royal official in the province, the Intendant of Brittany, queried one of his local agents about the reasons a physician and a surgeon had been hired at the crown's expense to tend to the sick during an outbreak of dysentery in the countryside near Nantes.
The agent responded that he had first requested the assistance of the nuns, asking them to treat freely the sick of Batz-sur-Mer, but they had been unable to comply with his appeal. The Sister Apothecary explained to him that they would normally have made every effort to provide charitably medicines that she herself had prepared, but the great difficulty posed by the geography of the region the populations of the two parishes were separated by a great distance had made it impossible for them to tend both to their own sick and to those of the other parish.
