Quebec: Death from Distrust

“The health officials immediately found, however, that in the poor neighborhoods of Montreal, where the flames of smallpox were concentrated, people did not take any preventive or control methods seriously. They would not cooperate with the health authorities. They would not send their sick children to the smallpox hospital. They would not even isolate their children. When the sanitary police placarded their homes, they tore down the placards.” (Bliss, 2011, p. 15)

Hotel-Dieu Montreal

Photograph (c. 1865) of the Hotel-Dieu Hospital in Montreal, where the 1885 smallpox outbreak originated

On February 28, 1885, an American railroad conductor named George Longley got off his train in Montreal, Quebec in the Dominion of Canada and went to a hospital after a local physician diagnosed him with smallpox. Unfortunately, hospital staff misunderstood Longley's condition to be chickenpox when he was checked in, so standard isolation procedures were not followed, and soon employees of Hôtel-Dieu Hospital began to come down with the disease. Attempts to disinfect the hospital came too late and seemingly disease-free patients evacuated from the hospital brought smallpox back to their communities. An epidemic was beginning by April.

The local Board of Health's plan to control the spread of smallpox through mass vaccination and quarantines quickly hit a snag when it became apparent that their vaccine supply was contaminated with erysipelas (a potentially serious bacterial infection of the uppermost layers of the skin that results in fevers and a bright red rash). More ominously, the city's poor were openly flouting public health measures. Additionally, two local doctors were agitating against vaccinations and claimed that the proper response to the outbreak was to improve sanitation in the slums, an initiative impoverished Montrealers had been long hankering for.

An incident of the smallpox epidemics in Montreal

1885 sketch by Robert Harris for Harper's Weekly illustrating the forceful quarantining of infected children during the smallpox outbreak in Montreal

As the epidemic continued into September, foreigners boycotted the city and its products, influential citizens urged mandatory vaccination, and the death toll rose to 100 per week, but resistance to public health measures became increasingly violent. At the end of the month, vaccine resistors stoned the Board of Health and attacked police in a riot outside city hall, prompting the mayor to call in a militia. Gradually, order was restored, death rates declined, and nearly one year after smallpox entered the city, the epidemic was declared over on January 31, 1886. Approximately 5,764 people had died in Montreal and its suburbs from smallpox. Historians recognize the outbreak as an unprecedented disaster for an industrial city at the end of the nineteenth century, rivaling epidemics that were characteristic of the beginning of the century.

Over 90% of smallpox victims in the city of Montreal were French-Canadian, and anecdotal and statistical evidence indicates that most of these deaths were of poor children living in cramped slums. Poverty alone does not explain this pattern: impoverished Irish slum dwellers and Haudenosaunee residents of a reservation near Montreal had no objections to vaccination and consequently were spared. Ultimately, socio-cultural rifts between the ruling English-Canadians and the marginalized French-Canadians created an atmosphere of distrust that fueled suspicion of vaccination. Public support for vaccination was overwhelmingly English-- the head of the corps that had spread contaminated vaccines was English, the factory bosses who ordered their workers to submit to vaccination were English, and the local politicians who urged widespread vaccination were English -- thus, rumors began to spread through French-Canadian neighborhoods that vaccination was a "race weapon" designed to propagate illness through their community.

Notre-Dame Roman Catholic Church Basilica - Montreal

2017 photograph by Avramescu Marius of the interior of the Roman Catholic Notre-Dame de Montréal Basilica

The French-Canadian population of Montreal was also a hotbed for a quasi-fundamentalist strain of Catholicism influenced by European ultramontanism that was antagonistic to any "accommodation" of modernity or liberalism. Although the Vatican had long supported vaccination and local priests advised parishioners to be vaccinated (albeit with some trepidation and a reluctance to restrict access to the sacraments), a pious fatalism was common among French-Canadian Montrealers. From this perspective, "the duty of the believer when faced with acts of God had to be acceptance and repentance" (Bliss, p. 28). The idea that the community may be best served by injecting children with a virus, then hauling them away from their parents to stay in a hospital riven with death was utterly contemptible.