[Hospital nuns attending indigent patients in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries].

Unacknowledged, the hospital nuns deserve to be studied. Their call (or vocation), tested by the selection during novitiate, sets them into hospital environment of XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries and is rarely refuted. Whatever their own religious families, they represent the majority of nurses. In spite of some conflicts, their increasing success in the service of hospitals depends on cheap, movable, flexible, docile and polyvalent communities.