Do you know Irma LeVasseur (1877-1964)? You should, for the good reason that his career arouses admiration. First French-Canadian female doctor, co-founder of the Sainte-Justine Hospital, in Montreal, and the Enfant-Jésus Hospital, in Quebec, she introduced pediatric medicine to us and valiantly contributed, twice , to the war effort. “On January 22, 1964, aged 87, Irma LeVasseur died in complete oblivion and indifference,” wrote Jacques Beaulieu, in 2011, in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association.
“I get angry when I think of the fate reserved for Irma LeVasseur,” writes historical popularizer Gilles Proulx in These daring women who shaped Quebec (Les Éditions du Journal, 2020, 232 pages). The ingratitude of his compatriots towards him scandalizes me! ” He is right. The woman, in fact, has all the makings of a remarkable heroine. Yet, so few Quebecers know about it.
With Irma goes to war (Editions du Septentrion, 2023, 328 pages), journalist Karine Gagnon, notably columnist for Quebec Journal, intends, in its own way, to correct this injustice. She is not the first to take this path. In the 2000s, Pauline Gill devoted a novel trilogy to the character, which I unfortunately have not read. I cannot therefore compare the two works, but I can at least say that Gagnon’s historical novel, despite a somewhat dull style which does not always avoid clichés, does beautiful justice to Dr. LeVasseur.
The latter’s life impresses in every respect. As she absolutely wanted to become a doctor — perhaps because she had lost three little brothers — and as this was impossible for a French Canadian at the time in Quebec, Irma went into exile in Minnesota to study, where she graduated in 1900. Her father, a journalist and musician with a large social network close to political power, fully supported her. Her mother, a singer, abandoned her family to live in the United States.
Banned from practicing in Quebec, LeVasseur then specialized in pediatrics in New York, working with Mary Putnam Jacobi, a doctor and suffragist who notably conducted a study showing that menstruation did not make women less efficient at work.
In 1903, LeVasseur obtained her right to practice in Quebec, but she first deepened her knowledge of pediatrics in France, with Doctor Madeleine Brès, a pioneer in the field. When she returned to Quebec, LeVasseur was scandalized by the infant mortality in Montreal and Quebec, hence her desire to create hospitals where sick children would be treated free of charge.
In both cities, his projects came to fruition — in 1908 in the metropolis and in 1923 in the capital — but, in both cases, LeVasseur withdrew immediately. The reasons for these withdrawals remain nebulous, according to historian Denyse Baillargeon, who wrote the article on LeVasseur in The encyclopedia Canadian.
Gilles Proulx, for his part, argues that the doctor was sidelined because they did not want a female doctor. Gagnon, in her novel, suggests instead that LeVasseur retired of her own accord because she considered that her vocation was medicine and not administration.
The woman, obviously, had a strong character. In the most intense pages of her novel, Karine Gagnon recounts the commitment of Doctor LeVasseur in the fight against the typhus epidemic, in 1915, in Serbia, in the middle of the war. The experience is like a trip to hell. LeVasseur, according to Gagnon, was an atheist, but would have sometimes prayed in front of this massacre, notably at the time of the death of one of his Serbian assistants, with whom the doctor – fiction or reality, here? — would have experienced the only idyll of his life.
Doctor Albiny Paquette, also involved in Serbia at the same time and future Minister of Health under Duplessis, was full of praise for the work of his colleague, describing her as “a woman of action with extraordinary energy » who never got discouraged.
How can we explain his sad end, then, lived in seclusion and destitution? In an excellent portrait that she devoted to LeVasseur in June 2007 in Quebec Sciencejournalist Noémi Mercier cited Denyse Baillargeon, evoking the hypothesis of a bipolar type mental illness, but also Pauline Gill, describing this conclusion as “rubbish”.
Irma LeVasseur, says Gill, was quite simply “psychologically worn out by all the adversity she had experienced in her life”, a thesis to which Gagnon also adheres, whose novel makes us want to console and love the old lady so deserving.
Columnist (Présence Info, Jeu), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.