Abstract not available. / Until now, historians have devoted relatively little attention to the rich field of patients' struggles with chronic progressive disease. This study proposes to begin to fill this lacuna by examining in detail the meaning and implications of one central principle of nineteenth-century clinical medicine: incurability. Though the judgement of incurability is the product of a medical encounter, its significance extended well beyond the clinic. For being incurable in nineteenth-century France was a social event in the broadest sense, putting the individual at the centre of a complex web of people with different expectations and duties. Patients and their farnilies sought relief and solace within the confines of their homes and, frequently enough, in hospital. The physician was expected to prognosticate and to heal, while women, usually members of the immediate family or a religious order, carried out the duties of daily care. Either by choice or institutional diktat, many incurably ill individuals were visited by a priest or some other representative of the Church. Finally, their lives were deeply influenced by the decisions of local and, to an ever increasing degree, national politicians mandated to tackle questions of charity and social policy. Each chapter of this thesis will examine facets of the experience of incurability within the context of existing social structures: medical, religious, economic, and political.

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This doctoral thesis concerns the Acadian teachers in the public schools of the eastern counties of Nova Scotia between the years 1811 and 1864. The early Acadian public school teachers provided the Acadians, the French speaking population, in Nova Scotia, instruction in their own French language even under legal constraints to do otherwise. The region covered in this dissertation includes the counties found on Cape Breton Island and the counties of Antigonish and Guysborough on the mainland portion of the province between 1811 the year of adoption of the first Education Act in Nova Scotia concerning public education and concludes with the 1864 Education Act which created a homogenous unilingual school system in English. Acadian education would progress from small groups of children taught by itinerant school masters and visiting mission priests to formal one-room school houses where numbers were sufficient. Lay teachers being found in the communities would perpetuate the French language following their own education at the few available institutions for training. The work of these Acadian public school teachers, even when legislation prohibited it, resulted in the survival of the Acadian French communities in eastern Nova Scotia. In the preparation of this thesis, original sources were used including school reports, school commissioner reports, and colonial census records, private journals of the bishops and priests as well as those of community members. The original sources are invaluable as a record of the year to year work of the Acadian public school teachers where there are few other documentary sources remaining of their work. While the origins of the public schools in Nova Scotia has been documented as well as Acadian schools, this is the first look at the Acadian public school teachers who worked in the various communities of eastern Nova Scotia and their backgrounds. / Educational Studies / D.Ed. (History of Education)

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published_or_final_version / Chinese Historical Studies / Master / Master of Arts