"Nearly a half century before Florence Nightingale became a legendary figure for her pioneering work in the nursing trade, nursing nuns made significant but little-known accomplishments in the field. In fact, in the nineteenth century, more than 35 percent of American hospitals were created and run by women with religious vocations. In Say Little, Do Much, Sioban Nelson casts light upon the work of the nineteenth-century women's religious communities. It was they who organized and administered home, hospital, epidemic, and military nursing in America as well as Britain and Australia. According to Nelson, the popular view that nursing invented itself in the second half of the nineteenth century is historically inaccurate and dismissive of the major advances in the care of the sick as a serious and skilled activity, and activity that originated in seventeenth-century France with Vincent de Paul's Daughters of Charity."--BOOK JACKET.

"Say little, do much": veils of invisibility--nursing nuns -- Martha's turn: vowed women and virtuous work -- Free enterprise and resourcefulness: an American success story--the Daughters of Charity in the northeast -- Behind enemy lines: religious nursing in England--conflicts and solutions -- At the margins of the empire: religious wars in the hospital wards of colonial Sydney -- Frontier: "the means to begin are none" -- Crossing the confessional divide: German Catholic and Protestant nurses -- The twentieth century: "every day life got smaller.".