Last summer, I did a radio show with Denis Goulet, associate professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Montreal and specialist in the history of medicine and disease. The meeting took place around his book entitled A brief history of epidemics in Quebec – from cholera to COVID-19. A pleasant and uplifting read in which we learn, among other things, that social resistance to vaccination and confinement is not new.
Posted yesterday at 10:00 a.m.
Let’s go back to Montreal, between 1875 and 1885. While waves of smallpox epidemics raged like “trolls” on Facebook, many French speakers refused the vaccine to protect themselves against the disease. In question, certain chroniclers and ecclesiastics spread a rumor according to which the British authorities sought to weaken the French Canadian population by injecting a poison into their veins!
In an English-language newspaper, they go so far as to peddle that if the disease spreads, it is because of the questionable hygiene of French speakers. What do you want ? The search for culprits and scapegoats is inseparable from the history of epidemics. There are even doctors to testify to the futility of vaccination. It must be said that at the time, vaccines, made from viruses whose virulence had been attenuated, carried their dose of risk.
Unlike today’s hypersafe vaccines, some vials could still contain germs that were still “healthy” enough to infect a person during their vaccination.
Add to that the very recent practice of vaccination at the time – and its part of the unknown for the common man – as well as the rudimentary methods of sterilization of syringes – which were as sure as the future of a Tory leader – and you paved the way for skeptics. The isolation of the infected, the confinement of sick children and their families in designated hospitals and the boarding up of houses will find resistance and incomprehension in part of the population.
When, overwhelmed by the scale of the epidemic, Mayor Honoré Beaugrand made vaccination compulsory, a crowd of angry demonstrators was convoyed to the city center. Wow the engines and down the masks, they too had their own truck ! Some besieged and set fire to the health office in the Faubourg de l’Est, where the equivalent of our current director of public health worked, others smashed the windows of the town hall or even threatened vaccinators right in front of their clean house !
At the request of the mayor of Montreal, the federal government mobilized 600 soldiers to enforce order, and to protect the doctors targeted by the demonstrators, they were flanked by police. In those years, as in ours, many people refractory to sanitary measures were convinced that the vaccine was more dangerous than the disease. As a result, the smallpox epidemic ultimately affected 20,000 people in Quebec, the majority of whom were disfigured. It took away 3,000 Montrealers, the vast majority of whom were Francophones who refused vaccination. I recommend that you read Denis Goulet’s book for a broader and enlightening dive into these subjects.
If the smallpox epidemic hit Montrealers head-on, the Spanish flu epidemic would have completely missed its target in the small north-coastal community of Baie-Johan-Beetz. In question, doctor Johan Beetz practiced quarantine there successfully. Remember that this forced, or strongly suggested, confinement is a very old practice that has proven itself in times of epidemic.
The first quarantine in history is said to have been enacted in Venice in 1374 when the city was “closed” for 40 days to spare the population from the bubonic plague. This public health practice will be baptized in Italy forty yearswhich means 40 days.
Ships put aside thus became less dangerous for the local population, and it was only at the end of their seclusion that the occupants were authorized to enter the city. It is a bit of this method that we still apply today, but in another form, in the fight against COVID-19. The method of Venice will be quickly imitated by the other large ports of the European Mediterranean. Moreover, each major port in Europe had its lazaret, a guarded fortress in which goods and suspicious foreigners had to remain in quarantine before being admitted to the city.
The Spanish flu therefore spared the small village of Baie-Johan-Beetz, because Dr. Johan Beetz practiced confinement there as a protection strategy. This Belgian doctor, aristocrat and sculptor arrived in this north-coastal hamlet in 1897 to found a fox farm! However, when the Spanish flu pandemic was declared in 1918, the doctor, who knew the techniques of quarantine and physical distancing, decided to apply them in the small community. He proposed to the villagers to apply all the sanitary measures which, earlier, enraged French-speaking Montrealers during the smallpox of 1885… and the world population today in these times of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is said that the village that had trusted Dr. Beetz was completely spared by this pandemic flu. The Spanish flu epidemic will kill 50,000 people in Canada and close to 15,000 in Quebec. But Baie-Johan-Beetz would not have deplored any deaths, unlike the other villages of Minganie which had not applied quarantine.
The history of epidemics is inseparable from scapegoats, conspiracy theories, fake news, accusations without nuance from all sides and all these behaviors that seem to us to come out of the social divide caused by COVID-19. These divisions that run through our societies are deja vu in another form. The fault is often blamed on the Internet, but these abuses existed long before the electronic highway, and even before the highways at all! As one social media enthusiast would say, she’s an old story. The more it changes, the more it is the same. I also wonder how historians who see that history is constantly repeating themselves do not get enough of it?
For those who want to push the subject further, in addition to Denis Goulet’s book, there is also Sonia Shah’s book entitled Pandemic which is another gold mine in the matter.