The duty continues its journey back to the sources of French America, focusing on the exploration of Quebec newspapers and archives. To broaden our horizons, we will travel from the northern confines of the Hudson to the sunny dreams of Florida, while tracing the thread of a shared history. Today, the medicine of Pierre de Sales Laterrière.
In 1789, while studying at Harvard, the famous Boston University, the adopted Canadian Pierre de Sales Laterrière had to practice dissection like his colleagues. Doctors, but also people of good society consider that an educated man must have looked into this machine that is the body in order to understand how to repair it and use it more effectively.
The bodies of the hanged are put to good use. Laterrière practiced dissection on the bodies of four of them. “I didn’t lose a hair! he proudly wrote in his posthumously published memoirs.
He can also count, to complete his work, on the body of an “old maid, big and fat” which was sold to him, with the complicity of the beadle of Christ Church. This beadle also left him a “shoe shovel” near the tomb to facilitate, on a favorable dark night, the recovery of the corpse. “It was a superb subject! Laterrière remembered.
The bodies of the most unfortunate deceased are regularly left to fend for themselves, unchecked. In Paris, explains the historian Philippe Ariès, a pioneer in research on social attitudes to death, the convoys to carry the corpses to the cemetery often stop. The time to take a trip to the cabaret, just to get drunk, the carriers abandon the bodies they are responsible for, the time to take courage to complete their sad task. At various times, the bodies are liable to be stolen, whether in London, Paris, Montreal or Boston.
In late 18th century Bostone century, the city has three cemeteries. In these places frequented by young doctors in the making, they do not even think of taking over the bodies of people from high society. There, as elsewhere, it is indeed the bodies of the poor, the destitute or the familyless that are the object of a tariffed trade. Popular disapproval of these practices is no less great.
The corpse is protected by a complex system of prohibitions that the Church upholds through its discourse. The popular reaction aroused in Canada by the dissection carried out on the body of Marie Brisebois, a twenty-three-year-old widow, illustrates this perfectly.
The Ghost of Brisebois
In 1791, the young Marie Brisebois was imprisoned for complicity in a murder. Installed in Trois-Rivières as a doctor, Laterrière was invited to observe him in his cell. Does she know that she will soon be executed and that whoever willingly observes her alive will be even happier to be able to observe her inert and cold?
Once unhooked from its gibbet, the body of this hanged man is given to Pierre de Sales Laterrière. A judge from Trois-Rivières was quick to give it to him.
The judge, that is to say the legal hand of the sovereign, manages life by pronouncing a decree of death penalty. Crowned with this crown of legitimacy, he orders the death of those who are seen as a danger to life in society. It is therefore in the order of things that he offers a corpse, the result of his power, to those who claim to study life. Doctor and judge are in a way the two poles of the same power which authorizes itself to manage death in the name of a biological idea of good society.
For society, offering the body to medicine is perceived as a second punishment. The fact of opening a body in the name of the future, far from being seen as an advance, is considered as an unjustified, odious punishment. The practice of the anatomist, basically, is perceived as an unjustifiable extension of the action of the executioner.
The stiffened body of Marie Brisebois, with its broken neck and characteristic greenish skin, is transported in an ice box to the house of Pierre de Sales Laterrière. There, during the winter, the doctor strives to analyze the flesh that has become waxy, while noting “the bad effect of the dissection of the hanged man on the mind of a weak public”. Without worrying too much about the pestilential odors emanating from the body, he nevertheless knows that his work causes a scandal.
He assumes, however, that this is due to his power of sight in relation to a myopic society for science, and that those who talk about it badly only confirm their lack of means to understand the world. The fact remains that the doctor had to resolve to leave Trois-Rivières to escape the opprobrium he had unnecessarily fueled by showing the “dry corpse” of Brisebois to anyone who came to his door, “on the condition of praying for his soul “.
The crate containing the bones of the deceased accompanies Laterrière, from Yamachiche to Nicolet, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence. His presence on board the boat also makes it possible to interrupt a storm, at least according to the doctor’s traveling companions. ” [Mes amis] were persuaded that they owed their salvation to a miracle which had been wrought by the virtue of the skeleton of La Brisebois, whom they regarded as a saint. »
Even Laterrière does not escape superstition. “What is certain is that since it has been in my possession, no accident has happened to me. »
Bleed his patients
The scandal, after all temporary, of the widow Brisebois does not prevent the Harvard graduate from prospering by multiplying the business. In 1799, Laterrière took advantage of his new professional stability to regularize his situation by marrying Marie-Catherine Delezenne, with whom he had been cohabiting for twenty years. The couple’s domestic happiness was, however, clouded the following year by the unhappy marriage of their daughter Dorothée to a homosexual, a “secret enemy of an amiable sex”.
In 1812, Pierre de Sales Laterrière became a country gentleman. He moved into his seigniorial manor of Les Éboulements. It is here, in the solitude of the mountains of Charlevoix, that the free-thinker writes memoirs that smell of “sulphur”, to use the expression of his biographer Bernard Andrès.
The notable blackens more than 500 pages of his pen by coloring his story with exaggerations and convenient shortcuts. The Frenchman of origin describes his aristocratic pretensions, his immigration to post-Conquest Canada in 1766 and his employment at the head of the Forges du Saint-Maurice during the American Revolution. His imprisonment without trial for three long years for complicity with the insurgents also generates its share of anecdotes.
It was on his release from prison that Laterrière devoted himself more seriously to medicine, which he had practiced as a hobbyist until then. On July 15, 1789, the day after the storming of the Bastille in Paris, the Canadian by adoption obtained from Harvard University the diploma made necessary for the exercise of his profession, which became more professional. With this paper in hand, the specialist in the treatment of puerperal fevers devotes himself to the bleeding of his patients. He had himself purged of his bad blood to balance his “moods” until his death in 1815, at the age of 71. His body was then buried with the notables of his time, under the floor of the cathedral of Quebec. There he is not in danger of being secretly exhumed by medical students, as will be the case for a long time to come.