Musée des hospitalières de l'Hotel Dieu de Montréal

This guide to the Musee des hospitalieres de l'Hotel-Dieu in Montreal opens on a January morning in 1657, when Jeanne Mance, bursar and the only trained nurse at the city's first hospital, slipped on the ice walking home from mass and injured her arm badly enough to threaten the six-bed hospital's care. It follows what she did about it, and the Hospitaller nuns from La Fleche who arrived in 1659 and ran the hospital for more than three centuries, until 1973. Inside, a staircase carried across the ocean from their motherhouse in France still leads up toward the collection.