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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Bernadette McCauley. Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick? Roman Catholic Sisters and the Development of Catholic Hospitals in New York City. (Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 146. $45.00.
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| This is a focused study of the role of Roman Catholic nuns in the founding and running of Catholic hospitals in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century New York City. Bernadette McCauley seeks to challenge stereotypical depictions of Catholic nuns as "menacing psychotics and passive church mice" (p. 96) by attending to their formative role as nurses and hospital administrators. She depends primarily on the archives of religious orders and hospitals to argue for the centrality of nursing sisters to the success of nineteenth-century Catholic hospitals, despite the later marginalization of these sisters in the mid-twentieth century. |
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McCauley's book is a short analysis of less than 100 pages (plus notes) that largely remains within the context of the history of hospitals in New York City. The book is organized in five chapters that consider the beginnings of Catholic hospitals in New York, the motivation and mission of nursing sisters, the styles of care and treatment given by nursing sisters, the finances structuring Catholic hospitals, and the challenges that the modernization of both medical care and medical administration brought to nursing orders. |
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