Catherine Jérémie was buried in Montreal, New France, on 1 July 1744, closing a long life as a pioneering midwife and botanist.
Catherine Jérémie was buried in Montreal, New France, on 1 July 1744, according to parish burial records cited by the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. She had lived to approximately eighty years of age, an unusually long lifespan for a woman in colonial New France, where high mortality rates from disease, harsh winters, and childbirth complications were common.
By the time of her death, Jérémie had built a decades-long reputation as one of the colony's most knowledgeable midwives and as an accomplished herborist who studied and catalogued indigenous Canadian flora. Her death marked the end of a career that bridged practical medicine and early natural science at a time when neither field was formally open to women in any institutional sense.
The burial record is significant because it provides the only precisely dated bookend to her life besides her baptism, allowing historians to establish a documented lifespan of nearly eighty years (1664–1744). Her contributions—assisting in the delivery of generations of colonial children and contributing botanical specimens and observations that were forwarded toward scientific circles connected with the Jardin des Plantes in Paris—outlived her by centuries, culminating in modern commemorations such as the naming of a Quebec City street, Rue Catherine-Jérémie, in her honour.