Amanda Viger: Spiritual Healer to New Brunswick's Leprosy Victims 1845-1906

Richard Wilbur is the author of The Rise of French New Brunswick and the
co-author of Silver Harvest: The Fundy Weirmen’s Story.

Losier, a journalist and researcher, has produced a fascinating
biography of a truly heroic figure in late–19th-century New Brunswick
Acadia. She burrowed into rarely used church archives in Montreal as
well as into more traditional sources in order to describe the
cloistered world of a religious order whose members, especially Amanda
Viger, were dedicated to serving their Lord by working to succor
society’s most-neglected and scorned group: lepers.

The author begins by describing Viger’s early years as a novitiate in
the Congregation of Notre Dame, where she was trained as a pharmacist
and hospital administrator. In 1861, Bishop Bourget of Montreal ordained
her as a member of the Religieuses Hospitalieres de Saint-Joseph. Seven
years later, Viger and five other sisters traveled to the remote Acadian
village of Tracadie. There, they found 20 patients housed in a
lazaretto, described by the author as “a jail within a jail where the
sick were the victims of anyone who had more power than they did.”

In addition to tending their patients (with the assistance of the local
priest, Father Gauvreau), the sisters provided the de facto hospital
care for the larger community and eventually ran its school. Their
schooling efforts led them into conflict with Bishop Rogers of Chatham,
who planned to build an English-speaking school of his own in Chatham.
Not long after, Viger became Mother Superior of the lazaretto, a
position she would hold several times over the next two decades. She
worked long hours running the pharmacy, teaching, and administrating and
still somehow found the time to write detailed letters (the kind
historians dream of finding, but rarely do) to her sister and her Mother
Superior in Montreal.

Viger assumed she would end her days in Tracadie, but events
intervened. Relations deteriorated between Father Gauvreau and Bishop
Rogers, who had never reconciled himself to the continuing existence of
the lazaretto. In the ensuing upheaval, Viger was posted to the
Arthabaska Hotel Dieu in the diocese of Nicolet (where her
administrative skills and strong personality would help restore yet
another ailing institution); it was there that this much-revered figure
died in 1906. Amanda Viger is a first-rate work of scholarship.