Jeanne Mance

Jeanne Mance (French pronunciation: [ʒan mɑ̃s]; 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 in 1642, she established its first hospital, the Hotel-Dieu de Montreal, 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 Religieuses hospitalieres de Saint-Joseph and continued to direct operations of the hospital. During her era, she was also known as Jehanne Mance by the French, and as Joan Mance by the English.

Jeanne Mance was born on 12 November 1606 in the fortified cathedral city of Langres in northeastern France, and was baptized the same day at the parish church of Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul. Her baptism record, which survives in the parish register of Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul, lists her under the contemporary spelling Jehanne and identifies her godparents as Antoine Esprit, a royal sergeant, and Catherine Gillot, the wife of Jean Haulteplein.

She was the second of twelve children born to Charles Mance and Catherine Emonnot. Her father worked as a royal prosecutor in Langres, an important episcopal centre, and her mother came from a family involved in legal work, including her grandfather Laurent Emonnot, who served as a legal officer. These ties placed the Mance household within the bourgeoisie de robe, the class of trained professionals who staffed the French legal system. Several relatives in the extended family were ecclesiastics who had travelled to New France.

As a teenager, Mance experienced a serious illness around the age of sixteen and recovered only narrowly. Later accounts describe her health as fragile for the rest of her life.

Her parents died when she was in her early twenties: her father in 1630 and her mother in 1632. These deaths left Mance and her older sister Marguerite responsible for supporting their many younger siblings and managing the household connected to their father's legal work.

Mance showed no desire to enter a religious order or to marry, the customary paths for women of her social class. Instead, she turned toward caregiving. In the 1630s, Langres was affected by the Thirty Years' War and repeated outbreaks of plague. Mance learned practical skills by tending to the sick, the wounded and the displaced. This work placed her within lay charitable networks shaped by early modern Catholic culture. Her experiences during the war and the epidemics formed the foundation of the vocation she would later pursue.

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. She was not interested in marriage in Nouvelle-France.

Mance was a member of the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal; its goal was to convert the natives and found a hospital in Montreal similar to the one in Quebec.