For more than 400 years, Jesuits working in Canada have written about their daily life and mission. Originally, their letters were published as The Jesuit Relations (Relations des jésuites). This blog,  igNation, continues that tradition with a new series entitled: Getting to Know the Relations.

Using excerpts chosen from the first 200 hundred years of these documents, the series presents vignettes which speak to the timeless heart of Jesuit endeavour: the promotion of discernment in order to help people find God in all things.

These excerpts are found in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents – Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in North America (1610 – 1791), selected and edited by Edna Kenton, and published in 1954 by the Vanguard Press. That edition uses the word “savages” throughout. In these excerpts that word has been replaced by “the people who were here before we arrived” or “the people here.”)     

Today: Reducing wait times in a busy clinic

In 1640, Paul Le Jeune SJ describes the heroic efforts of the newly-arrived Ursulines to provide comprehensive health care to the local people.     

The Hospital Nuns arrived at Kebec on the first day of August of last year [1639]. Scarcely had they disembarked before they found themselves overwhelmed with patients. The hall of the Hospital being too small, it was necessary to erect some cabins, fashioned like those of the [local people] in their garden. Not having furniture for so many people, they had to cut in two or three pieces part of the blankets and sheets they had brought for these poor sick people.

In a word, instead of taking a little rest and refreshing themselves after the great discomforts they had suffered upon the sea, they found themselves so burdened and occupied that we had fear of losing them and their hospital at its very birth. The sick came from all directions in such numbers, their stench was so insupportable, the heat so great, the fresh food so scarce and so poor, in a country so new and so strange, that I do not know how these good sisters, who almost had not even leisure in which to take a little sleep, endured all these hardships.

In brief, from the first of August until the month of May, more than one hundred patients entered the hospital, and more than two hundred [local people] found relief there, either in temporary treatment or in sleeping there one or two nights, or more. There have been as many as ten, twelve, twenty, or thirty of them at a time. What I am about to relate is taken from the letters that the Mother Superior has written me:

The patience of our sick astonishes me. I have seen many whose bodies are entirely covered with smallpox, and in a burning fever, complaining no more than if they were not sick, strictly obeying the physician, and showing gratitude for the slightest service rendered them.

The remedies that we brought from Europe are very good for the [people here], who have no difficulty in taking our medicines, nor in having themselves bled. The love of the mothers toward their children is very great, for they take in their own mouths the medicine intended for their children, and then pass it into the mouths of their little ones.

On Holy Thursday, as it is the custom of well-regulated hospitals to wash the feet of the poor, Monsieur our Governor wished to be present at this holy ceremony. In the morning Mass was said in the hall of the sick, where the Nuns and the sick … received communion. Then all the men were ranged on one side, and the women and girls on the other. Monsieur the Governor began first to wash the feet of the men, Monsieur the Chevalier de l'Isle, and the principal men of our French people followed.

The Nuns, with Madame de la Pelleterie, Mademoiselle de Repentigny, and several other women, washed the feet of the [local] women, very lovingly and modestly. God knows whether these [people] were touched, at seeing persons of such merit at their feet. The conclusion was very agreeable to them, for a fine collation was afterward offered them. A worthy man, a resident of the country, not being able to be present at this holy act, assembled his domestics in the evening, and did the same thing to them.