Jeanne Mance

Jeanne Mance 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, Canada, in 1642, she established its first hospital, the HtelDieu de Montral, 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 Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph, and continued to direct operations of the hospital.

Jeanne Mance was born into a bourgeois family in Langres, in HauteMarne, France. She was the daughter of Catherine monnot and Charles Mance, a prosecutor for the king in Langres, an important diocese in the northern Burgundy. After her mother died prematurely, Jeanne cared for eleven brothers and sisters. She went on to care for victims of the Thirty Years War and the plague.

Source: Wikipedia