In 1841, the Catholic bishop of Kingston, Remigius Gaulin, asked the Religious Hospitallers of Saint Joseph of Montreal to send a group of sisters to establish a Catholic Hospital in his city to provide care for the poorIrish Catholicimmigrants in the city. The RHSJs, however, were unable to find suitable buildings for their hospital until 1845. On September 2, 1845, Mother Amable Bourbonniere along with Sisters Huguette Claire Latour, Emilie Barbarie, and Louise Davignon, accompanied by their benefactress, Miss Josephine Perras and Mr. Laframboise, a friend of the community, arrived in Kingston. They stayed with the Kingston Notre Dame Sisters for two days, and then moved into their hospital, located in a small limestone building, now 229 Brock Street, on September 4, 1845. The Kingston RHSJs saw their first patient on September 7. By the end of October, they had refurbished and moved into their monastery, located at 233 Brock Street, allowing them to have a men's ward on the main floor of the Hospital and a women's ward on the second floor. The hospital was in operation when the city suffered an epidemic of typhus in 1847. In addition to ill and dying patients, Hotel Dieu cared for 100 orphaned children who had lost their parents. The disease had accompanied poor Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine in their homeland. No one yet understood how the disease spread, and poor sanitation practices compounded the epidemic. In 1892, the hospital was moved to its present location on Sydenham Street, which formerly housed Regiopolis College. In 1846, Alexander Macdonell established Regiopolis College, which offered academic and theological training to Roman Catholic youth. The original college building is now the Sydenham Wing of the Hotel Dieu Hospital. The main wing of the Hotel Dieu Hospital, the Jeanne Mance Wing, completed in 1984, is named for a woman sent by the RHSJ to New France in 1641. Jeanne Mance, a lay woman, was given the responsibility of founding a hospital and caring for the sick in New France. In 1642, she arrived in what is now Montreal and founded the first Hotel Dieu Hospital in 1645.
The hospital's Urgent Care Centre is meant for people with injuries or illnesses that are non-life threatening. All patients who are ambulatory and who are experiencing minor illness or injuries that cannot wait for a family doctor are directed to attend this clinic. The Urgent Care Centre is open from 8 a.m. – 8 p.m., 365 days/year.
In 1912 the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph established a nursing school in Kingston at Hotel Dieu Hospital. This became necessary as Sisters could no longer care for the increasing number of patients at the hospital. Training, which was initially provided by nursing Sisters and doctors at the hospital, ended with the graduate earning a three year diploma. It became a two-year program in 1970 The first class graduated in 1914 and the final class was the Class of 1974. In total, 1695 nurses graduated from the school The school was closed in 1973 as all hospital-based diploma nursing programs in Ontario were transferred to Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology. The Class of 1974 spent their first year at the Hotel Dieu and their second at St. Lawrence College.
