About this site

An independent history of the Daughters of Charity and the hospitals they worked in, from 1633.

The subject is the Company of the Daughters of Charity, founded in Paris in 1633, and the institutions its members worked in: the Hôtel-Dieu, the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés, the parish visits, and the houses that followed across Europe. The material is documented institutional history — how the organisation was constituted, how the wards were run, what was written down, and what happened when the emerging secular nursing profession met an existing one.

The site is independent of the institute it describes and speaks for nobody but itself. Belief appears here only where it is the documented motivation of the people in the record.

Photographs are drawn from Wikimedia Commons and from museum and reconstruction photography; credits sit beneath each figure that carries one.