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.