The French surgeon François Gendron (1618–1688) served the Jesuit mission to the Wendat as a voluntary labourer for six years, from 1643 until 1649. Later in life, he treated the queen mother of France Anne of Austria's breast cancer, using a remedy of his own device that appears to have been inspired by Indigenous practices he learned about in the Wendat mission. Gendron's story is not unknown, but he has mostly been remembered in Canada and in France—inaccurately, in both cases—as the first European physician to live in what is now Ontario and as a charlatan who took advantage of an ailing royal. In this Lecture in Catholic Experience, Micah True shows how accounting for the life and experiences of this little-studied participant in the Jesuit mission in New France yields important insights for our understanding of the earliest decades of settled Canada, and how the knowledge produced in the Jesuits’ missions there was received in France.
Micah True
Micah True is Professor of French and Folklore at the University of Alberta, where he also serves as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. He is the author of Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France, published by McGill-Queen's University press in 2015, and the translator of the Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix's 1744 epistolary account of his voyage through North America, published in Brill's Jesuit Studies series in 2019. His new book, published in 2025 by McGill-Queen's University Press, is The Jesuit Relations: A Biography.