Pure cinema.

The life story of François Gendron (1618-1668), a French surgeon who served the Jesuit mission to the Wendat from 1643 to 1649, alongside St. Jean de Brebeuf and other Canadian Martyrs, utterly captivated University of Alberta professor Micah True.       

"It's a cinematic story,” said True, who specializes in French and folklore. “He leaves home in rural France, somehow ends up on the shores of Lake Huron, and has these experiences. Then later in life, he's rubbing shoulders with the King of France, (philosopher) John Locke and the intellectual elite in Europe at the time.”

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And Gendron treated the ailing queen mother Anne of Austria’s breast cancer with a remedy he devised that was inspired by Indigenous practices he learned during his years in what is now present-day Ontario.

On March 12, True delivered a Lecture in Catholic Experience at Waterloo, Ont.'s St. Jerome’s University about how this often-overlooked “donne” — a contracted layperson — in the Jesuit missions in New France, who served “in dangerous conditions for no pay, largely for reasons of faith,” offers insights about life in early settled Canada. Gendron also distinguishes himself as an early example of a figure who accumulated knowledge from the Iroquoian-speaking Indigenous confederacy in his orbit and utilized it upon return to France.

In an interview with The Catholic Register days before the presentation, the author of The Jesuit Relations: A Biography desires for attendees — in person and online via YouTube — to understand “there's a lot that we don't know about the French presence in eastern Canada, whether it's Jesuits or lay people like Gendron. We can nonetheless piece together these stories if we look carefully, if we dig through the archives and standard travellers’ tales we tend to read, like the Jesuit relations.”

True’s 2025 book is credited with challenging previous accounts of the annual reports produced from 1632 to 1673, concerning the experiences of the Society of Jesus missionaries. His scholarship indicated how the missionaries alone did not compose these narratives. “Indigenous people, lay settlers, nuns, editors in Paris and readers in France made contributions.”

The U of A's  associate dean of faculty and graduate studies is not done in his studies. In fact, one of True’s hopes for the St. Jerome’s presentation is to receive audience questions that could spark further directions for his research.

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He is already considering a book centred on Gendron’s life story in part because it will be a project requiring full archival immersion.

“What further interests me is that Gendron’s story is not one he seems to have told himself within his own lifetime,” said True. “This was all pieced together long after the fact, which suggests to me that there are probably a lot of other cases like this where (Indigenous) knowledge or practices were brought back (to France) but never documented. The work of excavating those stories is not just as simple as reading a travel account. We really have to do the spade work in the archives to dig up these stories.”

An admirable quality of Gendron in True’s eyes is that he was “a very curious person, interested in cultivating knowledge and learning new things,” an important trait, particularly now as knowledge sharing is considered a key dimension of ongoing Indigenous reconciliation efforts.

Gendron’s efforts paid off as the treatments he developed in cooperation with the Indigenous earned him renown among the poor and the French elite as an effective surgeon during the 17th century (keep in mind that arsenic was commonly used at the time). True said one remedy that stands out in his book is what he called his “sachet,” defined as “little bundles of minerals that he used on cancerous lesions.”

He used an Indigenous-inspired ointment — according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography “its base was a powder made from stones that he had discovered on the shores of Lake Erie and which he called “Erie Stones” (“Pierres Ériennes”) — for Anne of Austria’s breast cancer. Gendron’s work was dismissed as charlatanism from peers, said True, because he “was not one of them.”

Gendron did not study at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, and some believed he was “something of a fly by night, ‘let's try this weird rock and see if it works.’ ”

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True is eager to unpack Gendron’s legacy through his future work. A trip back to Paris to review archival material will likely be an objective in the coming months.

View the presentation via the St. Jerome's University YouTube account.