Saint René Goupil, Surgeon

Abstract

Saint René Goupil is the patron of the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists. Given his training as a surgeon and his efforts to relieve the suffering of others, he makes an excellent patron for physicians also. Goupil worked at the Hôtel Dieu Hospital in Sillery, near Quebec City, which combated the Indians' practice of euthanasia by providing palliative care. There, as well as in his captivity, he epitomized a Catholic medical practice which shows concern for the soul as well as the body. Finally, Goupil bore heroic witness to the dignity of all human persons when he offered medical treatment even to one of his Mohawk torturers.

In 1951, the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists chose Saint René Goupil, one of the North American Martyrs canonized in 1930, as their patron.¹ This is fitting, given Goupil's training as a surgeon, and his charitable efforts to relieve pain even while suffering excruciating torments at the hands of the Iroquois Indians. St. René would also make an excellent patron for physicians.

The Saint as Surgeon

Most of what we know about St. René Goupil (1608–1642) comes from the pen of St. Isaac Jogues, who shared Goupil's captivity among the Iroquois. Jogues, one of the Jesuits who ministered to the Algonquin, Montagnais, and Huron Indians of Canada during the seventeenth century, testified that Goupil “understood surgery well.”² Goupil was a barber-surgeon, and as such, lower in the medical pecking order of the day than surgeons proper or physicians. His major duties would have been bloodletting and dressing wounds.³ However, some writers have overemphasized Goupil's inferior status as a barber-surgeon. We know, for instance, that Goupil was literate.⁴ In addition, barber-surgeons actually represented the most dynamic force in medicine in contemporary France. Unlike physicians, who only treated illness with diet, regimen, or medicine, barber-surgeons pioneered the use of operatio manualis, manual operations. These would have included all surgical procedures, and the scientific study of anatomy, too, remained largely a preserve of barber-surgeons well into the early modern period.⁵ Since physicians did no surgery, an anatomy course was created for Parisian barbers in the late fifteenth century.⁶ Thenceforward, French barber-surgeons remained on the cutting edge (so to speak) of new medical developments, while the surgeons proper, entrenched in a group called the Society of St. Côme, drifted into irrelevance until they united with the college of barber-surgeons in 1656.⁷ The most important medical practitioner of sixteenth-century France, Ambroise Paré, was a barber-surgeon.⁸ Barber-surgeons acquired even higher status in colonial Canada because of the lack of trained physicians. The “king's physician,” an official title and royal appointment, in Quebec during Goupil's residence there was actually a barber-surgeon, Robert Giffard.⁹

The Mission and the Hospital

In 1639, the thirty-year-old Goupil was received into the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at Paris.¹⁰ Goupil sought to become not a priest but a coadjutor Jesuit brother, but he was dismissed from the novitiate. In 1932 Fr. Léon Pouliot found a document stating that Goupil had to leave the novitiate because of increasing deafness, but as this document has no date, its authority cannot be considered certain.¹¹ Nevertheless, determined to serve the Jesuit missions in some capacity, Goupil took ship for Canada sometime in 1640. By November or December, he was working at the Mission of St. Joseph at Sillery, near Quebec City. We know this because Goupil is listed in the baptismal register of St. Joseph's as godfather to an Indian who received emergency baptism on November 18, 1640. Having recovered, the neophyte, who “was named René Atouré by a domestic,” received the missing baptismal ceremonies on December 30.¹² The Jesuit Relations usually describes Goupil as a donné, a new category of Jesuit co-workers invented by the Canadian missionaries.¹³ Arthur Melançon, S.J., attempted to prove that Goupil was still a coadjutor brother while serving in Canada; according to Melançon, this was the only way to make sense of Jogues's statement that at Sillery, Goupil was employed “two whole years in the meanest offices about the house.”¹⁴ However, Jogues's account clearly states that Goupil was a donné, while Lalemant's memorandum declares that “we have always deferred receiving Brother Coadjutors here.”¹⁵ It is true that shortly before Goupil's martyrdom, Jogues allowed Goupil to pronounce the vows of a coadjutor brother, but he was careful to add that his companion only did so “as much as was possible for him.”¹⁶

In spring 1638, Fathers Le Jeune and De Quen had inaugurated the mission with two families of about twenty Indians in residence.¹⁷ But the priests' mission work was greatly aided when the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, a hospital run by the Mères Hospitalières de Dieppe (Hospital Mothers of Dieppe),¹⁸ transferred to Sillery in December 1640. The main goal of the Hospitalières was to reduce the practice of euthanasia among the Indians. As the official eighteenth-century Annals of the Hôtel-Dieu recorded, “those among them who followed their ancient and barbarous custom killed the old people in order to put an end to their ills, believing they rendered them a great service in this.”¹⁹ The sisters provided palliative care for the sick and elderly. At first, however, the prevalence of contagion wherever Europeans went in the New World diminished the effectiveness of the sisters' apostolate. Noticing that their comrades who entered the hospital tended to die of epidemic disease, the Sillery Indians fled into the forest. But realizing that they continued to perish in the woods, the Algonquins and Montagnais soon returned to the Mission of St. Joseph. In 1642, the sisters reported treating up to three hundred patients²⁰ and dispensing four hundred fifty doses of medicine.²¹ By 1643, thirty-five to forty Indian families had taken up residence at Sillery.²²

Treating wounds and sores—smallpox, ulcers, chancres—was such an important part of the sisters' apostolate that they used up all their own linens as bandages.²³ Goupil, with his surgical expertise in dressing wounds, proved useful at the Hôtel-Dieu. For the Relation of 1640, one of the Hospitalières reported on the case of Lazare Petikouchkaouat, “afflicted with very painful sores” which were “large and deep” and putri-fied. Lazare, clearly named after the poor man afflicted with sores in Jesus' parable of Lazarus and Dives (Lk 16:19–31), “particularly loved the young man [presumably Goupil] who offered himself to our hospital to assist the poor patients; but then it must be confessed that this good young man succored him with a charity that cannot be sufficiently praised. He called this patient his consolation.” Having confessed and received Holy Communion, Lazare died saying, “Jesus, have pity upon me.”²⁴ This story brings out an important aspect of the medical practice of Goupil and the sisters at Sillery. They could do little for the body, having a limited supply of medicine and none of the dainty foods considered restorative.²⁵ Indeed, their presence as European carriers of epidemic diseases was often harmful to the Indians' bodies. Nevertheless, by their devoted charity for the sick they taught the Indians—and those Europeans who might have been inclined to diminish the Indians' humanity—about the value of the human person. Thus, with the aid of the Jesuits at St. Joseph, they promoted spiritual healing and a more Christian attitude towards physical suffering.²⁶ And Goupil played an important role in the sisters' anti-euthanasia campaign.

While René Goupil worked at Sillery, Isaac Jogues was stationed at the Jesuits' western outpost among the Huron Indians, on the shores of Lake Huron. Having fallen ill shortly after his arrival in the land of the Hurons, Jogues experienced keenly the lack of a surgeon at the mission when he was forced to bleed himself. The Hurons, too, fell victim to epidemics, which often led them to blame and persecute the “blackrobes” in their midst.²⁷ Jogues must have felt that the presence of a surgeon at the mission would help to calm the Hurons' fears, as the nuns' ministrations had won the hearts of the Indians at Sillery.²⁸ Thus, when Jogues accompanied the annual Huron canoe flotilla to Quebec City in 1642, he asked his Jesuit superior to send Goupil to Huron country with him “because the Hurons had great need of a surgeon.”²⁹ The superior, Barthelemy Vimont, later recalled that when Goupil was asked to go to Huron territory, “his heart expanded at the thought of the dangers that he was about to incur for his master.”³⁰

The danger arose from the increasing tension between the Iroquois and the French. During the 1640s, the Iroquois were aligned with their trading partners, the Dutch of New Netherland, against the French and their Algonquin and Huron allies. The Mohawks, for instance, having lost up to three-quarters of their population to disease,³¹ were threatened with extinction by the Algonquins, until the Dutch began supplying them with firearms. This led to a Mohawk resurgence, since the French refused to supply their Indian allies with guns. The French, wishing to end the Dutch monopoly on furs from Iroquois territory, sought a trading relationship with the Iroquois.³² For a time, the Five Nations appeared receptive; to signal their openness to peace, the Iroquois did not torture or kill those Frenchmen they captured during the first two years of the 1640s. Negotiations were opened at Quebec, but it soon became apparent to the French that the Iroquois wished only to lull them into a false sense of security so that they could revenge themselves on the Algonquins.³³ After the peace talks broke down acrimoniously, the French started building a new military installation, Fort Richelieu. The Iroquois began sending out war parties continuously to harass the French allies,³⁴ and announced that they would show no mercy to any Frenchman who fell into their custody.³⁵

Christian Witness during Torture

Rumors had already reached the Jesuits of the “strange tortures” the Iroquois inflicted on prisoners, usually culminating in death by fire and cannibalism.³⁶ Indeed, the Algonquins and Hurons put their own captives through similar torments, and the Jesuits had been trying to break them of this deeply ingrained cultural habit.³⁷ On the other hand, after the failed peace initiative, the French for the first time felt it necessary to arm the Christian Indians with guns.³⁸ Thus when the Huron canoes departed Three Rivers for their return voyage on August 1, 1642, all sixty aboard³⁹—including Jogues and Goupil—knew they were rowing into the midst of an escalating crisis. The next day they ran into a Mohawk ambush. Goupil fought back alongside the Hurons, but was captured; Jogues, hidden nearby, voluntarily surrendered himself so that he could minister to Goupil and the other captives.⁴⁰ Their suffering began immediately. The Iroquois “fell upon us like mad dogs, with sharp teeth—tearing out our nails, and crushing our fingers, which he [Goupil] endured with much patience and courage.”⁴¹ Their agony continued throughout the long journey back to the Mohawks' homeland. In each village the Iroquois, stimulated by the unheard-of spectacle of Frenchmen and Christian Indians on the torture platform, turned out to greet the prisoners with new torments.⁴² The captives' fingers, crushed between the teeth of the Iroquois, began to fill with pus and to putrefy. When their entire bodies were covered with wounds, according to the 1652 account by Jogues' confrère Jacques Buteux, the Iroquois ripped open the older wounds, just beginning to heal, with their sharp fingernails.⁴³ Jogues described the “incredible pain” and recounted how maggots soon appeared in the festering sores. Thus Goupil's hands, which had tended to the sores of Lazare Petikouchkaouat, were themselves spared no pain. But the worst was yet to come. Already so covered with bruises, ac cording to Jogues, “that all we could see was the white of his eyes,” Goupil suffered the amputation of his “right thumb at the first joint.”⁴⁴ Buteux noted that the torturers employed for this operation an “écaille d'huitre,” an oyster shell, “so that the pain might be more intense.”⁴⁵ In another document, Jogues recalled that Goupil “continually uttered, during this torment: ‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph.’”⁴⁶

The Relation of 1642 to 1643 notes that in his sufferings, Jogues had “no other Physician or other Surgeon than patience; no other salve than pain.”⁴⁷ Buteux was closer to the mark when he noted that “God wanted Himself, alone, to be their consolation and their doctor.”⁴⁸ If Goupil was too incapacitated to tend to Jogues' wounds, he nevertheless strengthened the priest by his example of Christian endurance. In turn, Jogues consoled Goupil, whom he called his “dearest companion,”⁴⁹ with the sacrament of penance. This mutual spiritual care bore fruit in one heroic act of virtue on Goupil's part. According to Jogues' “Account of René Goupil,” even amid the tortures of their journey, Goupil found the strength to help one of his Mohawk enemies with his surgical expertise. “He opened a vein for a sick Iroquois, and all that with as much charity as if he had done it to persons very friendly.”⁵⁰ This was mentioned in Goupil's cause for canonization as a “wonderful example of Christian charity.”⁵¹ Through this act, Goupil bore heroic witness to the dignity of all human persons, even strangers and enemies.

The captives eventually reached the Mohawk village of Ossernenon.⁵² Here Goupil continued to perform spiritual works of mercy with his mutilated hands.⁵³ Jogues recounted how

one day, seeing a little child of 3 or 4 years … with an excess of devotion and of love for the Cross, and with a simplicity which we who are more prudent than he, according to the flesh, would not have shown,—he took off his cap, put it on this child's head, and made a great sign of the cross upon its body. The old man [a relative of the child], seeing that, commanded a young man of his cabin … to kill him,—which order he executed.

Goupil was bludgeoned to death on the feast of St. Michael the Archangel, September 29, 1642; Jogues was at his side to absolve him.⁵⁴ The testimony in Goupil's cause for canonization portrays him as a martyr for the sign of the Cross.⁵⁵ Goupil's legacy of Christian compassion in medical treatment was carried on by the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu. Several weeks after Goupil's martyrdom, a captive Indian of the Socoquiois [Sokikiois] tribe, allied to the Iroquois, was brought to Sillery. Having been taken prisoner by French-allied Indians, the Socoquiois suffered tortures similar to those endured by Goupil and Jogues. The nuns cared for him, and an Abenaki (a Native American tribe in Northern New England and Southern Quebec) who spoke the captive's language explained that the sisters were virgins who devoted their lives to the sick. “That greatly impressed his mind.”⁵⁶ Once recovered, the Socoquiois was allowed to return to his people. He promptly dispatched presents to the Mohawks in order to redeem a Frenchman from captivity; according to Jogues, the Mohawks kept the presents but declined to release a captive.⁵⁷ Nevertheless, in the long run, the Iroquois and their allies would become more receptive to Catholicism. When the Jesuits were first able to establish a mission among the Iroquois, in 1646, it was dedicated to the Martyrs. Jerome Lalemant wrote that “it is with good right that it is made to bear the name of the Martyrs,” because the mission had “already been crimsoned with the blood of one Martyr,” René Goupil.⁵⁸ This mission would convert many Mohawk Christians, among them Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha.

Thus the blood of the martyrs was once again the seed of Christians. Jogues narrated how he and Goupil had “offered ourselves to Our Lord … beseeching him to receive our lives and our blood, and to unite them with his life and his blood for the salvation of these poor peoples.”⁵⁹ Later, having escaped with the aid of the Dutch, Jogues was determined to return to the Mission of the Martyrs, where he would find his own martyrdom in 1646. Shortly before his death, Jogues expressed the wish that “the little blood that I shed in that land be a pledge of what I am willing to give him [Christ] from all the veins of my body and from my heart.”⁶⁰ This is not the sort of “blood drive” we are accustomed to, but the blood shed by Goupil and Jogues was linked to the foundation of Catholic health care in North America at the Hôtel Dieu. Certainly René Goupil is a powerful example and intercessor for Catholic medical workers as they provide compassionate care for all human persons from conception to natural death.