Sister Sophie Gauvin (1860-1947) (ph_3501)

Born at Van Buren, Maine, Sophie was raised on the Canadian side of the boarder, at St. Leonard. After having worked at the presbytery with Miss Launière, the parish priest’s sister and a friend of the Saint-Basile Community, Sophie asked for admission at the noviciate in 1881, as a lay sister. For more than fifteen years, she looked after the contagious, the paralyzed, the feverish patients in the house of quarantine called Saint-Jean-de-Dieu. The Chronicles recall that a two year old girl was very sick. Sister Sophie rocked the baby girl in her arms and fought with death over her. The little girl was cured. Sister Sophie died in her eighties. Photo taken near the old wooden Hôtel-Dieu, around 1880.