Charlotte Tassé (1893-1974), a tireless promoter of the French-Canadian nurses model

Biography
By Alexandre Klein
English

A forgotten figure of the history of healthcare as well as Quebec’s history, Charlotte Tassé (1893-1974) was a figurehead of the professionalization of Quebecoise nurses. This French-Canadian nurse established and ran two nursing schools, launched and directed a professional reference journal for thirty-five years, actively participated in the development of psychiatric nursing in Quebec, owned and managed one of the most important mental healthcare centers in the country, and also created a new class of nurses in Quebec: practical nurses. One of her main achievements was to establish and defend, with tenacity and persistence and through all her endeavors, a unique nursing model that was specific to Quebec: the French-Canadian nurses model. With its traditional values of care and femininity and avant-gardist representations of the nurses’ job, which she dedicated to hospital management, her model contributed to making the history of nurses in Quebec unique and original. This paper focuses on the creation of this model and the active promotion it has benefited from for half a century by recounting, thanks to unpublished archives, the history of Charlotte Tassé’s exceptional career.

Keywords

  • history of nursing
  • French Canada
  • women’s history
  • psychiatry
  • Quebec
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