| Building on the Catholic devotional revolution that occurred in Europe in the nineteenth century, the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ asserted their ability to control public space in Germany and later in the United States. This dissertation describes the founding of this order of Catholic sisters in 1850 by Katherine Kasper and details the impact the group had on health care in the midwestern United States. The sisters began to establish missions in the United States in 1868 where they staffed schools, hospitals, and orphanages in German immigrant communities. The dissertation is divided into five chapters that delineate topics such as the spiritual bases of the order, the arrival of the sisters in the United States and the creation of an ethnic identity, the building of hospitals in America, the sisters' work at the Chicago smallpox hospital, and the introduction of scientific training and methods into the sisters' American hospitals.; The dissertation draws several conclusions. First, Mother Kasper partook in and helped to create an ethic of Catholic community development that had public and political consequences. This ethic rejected the Enlightenment and gave primacy to the spiritual, centering around obedience, poverty, chastity, and service to the poor. Through a community structure, the sisters asserted the relevance of this ethic to the public sphere. Second, the sisters' community structure, and the ethic that it perpetuated, was built in Germany and was relevant in the United States. The sisters served German immigrant communities. They brought nursing and administrative skills from Germany. They also brought a politically active Catholicism through which they mobilized Catholics in the areas they settled to assert a right to public space. Finally, this project demonstrates the flexibility of the community of the Poor Handmaids. The sisters brought hospital workers into a relationship with the community, and they accommodated scientific practices fairly easily. As long as lay people and scientific developments coincided with community goals, they could be accepted. |
