Apothecaries at the Ursuline Convent Hospital, 1732–62: Creole Compounding and Subversive Healers

While the Ursulines are renowned in New Orleans for being Counter-Reformation French, female educators, they were initially recruited by the Company of the Indies in 1727 for the primary purpose of staffing the military hospital in New Orleans. However, it was not until 1734, when the first convent of the Ursulines was built, with an attached hospital, that the sisters took over their obligation to heal the sick. Known as the King’s Hospital, it not only cared for the king’s soldiers, sailors and workers, but also the king’s enslaved. Although housed in segregated spaces within the hospital, this space was a multiethnic place where people of various statuses interacted under diverse circumstances. The human, material and spatial organization of the hospital created creolized spaces that reveal the complex ways in which the gender, racial and religious boundaries of the convent were continually being reconstituted.

This paper paints a portrait of the hospital and pharmacy between 1732-1762 when Sister St. Francois Xavier (1698-1762), a choir nun from Bayeux, France and apothecary, and Jean-Baptiste (1710?-1760’s), an enslaved African, trained as a surgeon and apothecary, worked together. Despite their difference in status, it was Jean-Baptiste’s knowledge of Indigenous and African healing traditions on which Sister Xavier relied (Vidal, 2019). My analysis focuses on what the use of space and the material culture of healing can tell us about the ways in which Sister Xavier and Jean-Baptiste negotiated the unequal power dynamics of their relationship while simultaneously embracing the role of apothecaries/pharmacists/healers, an identity most often reserved for French, white, male officials. This paper will draw on a variety of archival sources including the Records of the Superior Council of Louisiana, the Archives of the Ursuline Nuns of the Parish of New Orleans, Census Records, and the Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.