Catherine Jérémie’s biography

Translated transcript:

JÉRÉMIE, dit Lamontagne, CATHERINE, midwife, botanist; baptized in Quebec City on September 22, 1664, daughter of Noël Jérémie, dit Lamontagne, trader, and of Jeanne Pelletier, buried in Montreal on July 1, 1744.

There are few documents that allow us to retrace Catherine Jérémie’s life. On January 28, 1681, she married Jacques Aubuchon in Champlain, near Trois-Rivières, and had a daughter. On November 3, 1688, in Batiscan, she contracted a second marriage, this time to Michel Lepailleur de Laferté, from whom she had ten or eleven children. In 1690 the Lepailleurs were living in Quebec City, and in the fall of 1702, they moved to Montreal, where Lepailleur obtained a commission as a royal notary. It was in this city that Catherine Jérémie practiced her profession as a midwife and established her reputation as a herbalist .

In the 17th century, French naturalists, supported by the intendants of New France, sought to discover the medicinal and utilitarian properties of the Canadian flora. Each year, the intendants encouraged the harvesting of plants and the shipping of live or dried specimens to France on the king’s vessels. Without being of the importance of a Pehr Kalm or even of Jean-François Gaultier and Michel Sarrazin, who contributed most to the knowledge of the Canadian flora, Catherine Jérémie ranks among amateur botanists such as Jean-Baptiste Gosselin, Hubert-Joseph de La Croix, Joseph-François Lafitau and Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix. She distinguished herself not only in collecting plants but particularly in attaching to her shipments notes explaining the properties and effects of the medicinal herbs. According to the testimony of Intendant Hocquart in 1740, Mme Lepailleur, who had been widowed in 1733, had “long striven to discover the secrets of Indian medicine.”