| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Say Little, Do Much: Nurses, Nuns, and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century. By Sioban Nelson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. 237 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8122-3614-9.)

In Say Little, Do Much, Sioban Nelson offers the first extensive critical account of the role of vowed religious women (Roman Catholic and Anglican nuns and Protestant deaconesses) in the development of nursing in the West. Nelson's impressive synthesis of primary and secondary literature on religion, gender, medicine, and politics ranges across three continents and four religious traditions, opening up significant new directions for scholarship on women and work in the modern world. 1

Organized nursing by religious women began in seventeenth-century France, but Nelson's study rightly focuses on the nineteenth century, when vowed women—particularly Roman Catholic sisters—contributed significantly to the growth of institutional health care through their work in hospitals they owned and managed. Their work has been ignored or underappreciated by most historians, and Nelson offers a persuasive analysis of the scholarly biases that have discouraged attention to religious women. . . .

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