Charlotte Tassé and Bernadette Lépine, Fully-Fledged Founders of l’Institut Albert-Prévost
In September 1919, just a few weeks after its opening, Dr. Albert Prévost’s sanatorium welcomed its first nurse. Charlotte Tassé was only 26 years old. She was coming back from six months of specialized training in the US and had accepted to help for only two weeks. She will stay 44 years! Quickly become essential to Dr. Prévost, who was very busy with his responsibilities at the Université de Montréal and l’Hôpital Notre-Dame, the young nurse established herself as the heart of this small mental health facility. When the neurologist died, in 1926, she ensured that the sanatorium survive, helped by a new young recruit named Bernadette Lépine. Twenty years after, in 1945, the two nurses saved the institution from bankruptcy by buying it with their own funds. Then, they deeply transformed its organisation and reinforced its training offer, managing to transform it, in a few years only, in one of the most important and avant-garde mental health care and training centers in Québec. However, the arrival of a young and ambitious psychiatrist named Camille Laurin, at the end of the 1950s, knocked the long-standing stability of the institution and then quickly made the important role of the nurses forget. Based on the study of unpublished archives, this paper relates the story of these women and their major contribution to the history of Albert-Prévost Institut.