Continuity and Change 16 (1), 2001, 95135.

Printed in the United Kingdom

" 2001 Cambridge Uniersity Press

A deadly discrimination among

Montreal infants, 18601900

P A T R I C I A T H O R N T O N * AND S H E R R Y O L S O N

. We compare Montreal s three largest cultural communities French

Canadian, Irish Catholic, and Anglo-Protestant with respect to infant surial oer
the forty years 18601900. From three birth cohorts we present eidence for a
powerful and persistent cultural dimension which outweighs distinctions of social
status. The local cultural mix offers insights into mechanisms operating through a
chain of cultural practices, property interests, ethnic politics, and spatial segregation.

With respect to infant survival over the forty years 18601900, did
Montreal s three largest cultural communities French Canadian, Irish
Catholic, and Anglo-Protestant respond in the same way to a period of
intense industrialization ? In an examination of three birth cohorts, we
anticipated finding higher mortality in working-class families who bore
the brunt of industrialization, and, since the city was growing larger,
dirtier, and more densely populated, we anticipated a trend to stronger
expression of environmental effects. In the years 18601880 the population
doubled in the urbanized area, and it doubled again in 18801900. Urban
growth, by giving value to land, induced intensification of its use, achieved
by construction of triplex (triple-decker) row housing in factory suburbs.
Although residential densities did not approach those of tenement-house
districts of New York or Chicago, peak densities doubled between 1880
and 1900, reaching levels not seen before in Montreal."
We did not find a straightforward relationship with income or social
status, but present here the evidence for a powerful cultural dimension
which persisted over three generations. We propose an interpretation in

* Department of Geography, Concordia University.

Department of Geography, McGill University.

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terms of the impact of a propertied interest, operating through a chain

of cultural practices, ethnic politics, and spatial segregation. The article is
organized in four sections. A discussion of sources and methods is
followed by findings with respect to infant mortality. We then report
evidence of fertility decline in the third cohort, and discuss the relationship
between infant mortality and fertility in the tri-cultural context. Finally we
make a geopolitical interpretation of the demographic system . The
cultural mix and the colonial and institutional history of Montreal are
distinctive, providing a laboratory case of mechanisms which appear to be
widespread, since municipal government is, in all Western cities, founded
upon the fiscal privileges and liabilities of property owners ; and in many
urban habitats, down to the present day, interactions of cultural and
social difference have exerted a lethal discrimination among infants.

.
For infants born in Montreal and its suburbs 1 January through 31
December 1859, 1 April 1879 through 31 March 1880, and 1 April 1899
through 31 March 1901 (a two-year span hereafter referred to as the
cohort of 1900), we collected records of baptisms and burials, and
matched them with the surviving children or families recorded in the next
census (January 1861, April 1881, or April 1901). We also employed city
directories (compiled annually in June), the municipal taxroll (compiled
annually in May), and subsequent baptismal or burial records, to ensure
that all families retained in the samples were under observation for 12
months after the birth. In the parish records a search for next births was
designed to cover a span of 48 months after the target births.
Quebec parish records rival those in Europe for their completeness and
accuracy. While record-matching is as demanding as elsewhere, am-
biguous cases (excluded) are rare since the Catholic records contain a
large number of variables, including mothers maiden name and the
child s age at death. Protestant church records are more variable in the
information they supply, but matching of Anglo-Protestant records is
favoured by a greater diversity of surnames and more reliable appearance
in city directories.#
For the 1900 cohort, on which we focus in this article, records were
collected from 27 Catholic and 100 Protestant churches, and compiled to
ensure the closest possible comparison with findings we have reported for
cohorts of 1860 and 1880. Unless otherwise specified, the tables and
figures refer to a sample of 2363 infants, all of whom, except for 23 sets
of twins,$ were born to separate families over the two-year period. As
compared with the earlier cohorts, the span over which we tracked next

96


births is longer (48 months rather than 33 months), and our search of the
census is more thorough.% The census of 1901 is the first which consistently
records street addresses, and these can be matched with addresses
reported in cemetery registers.& For the five years beginning 1 April 1899
we collected deaths of married men and women under 50. Each set of
records was compiled independent of the others, except for a search for
date of marriage of parent couples in genealogical indexes.
The consistent coverage of Montreal sources would permit a wide
variety of sampling strategies. Experience with the first cohort convinced
us of the value of reducing sample size in order to enlarge the array of
variables and permit confrontation of sources. In each successive exercise
we reduced the density of sampling : in 1860 100 per cent of births, in 1880
50 per cent, in 1900 12 per cent. The 1900 sample was drawn by selection
of surnames beginning with the letters B and R.' One can go too far, of
course, and analysis of the 1900 cohort is constrained by the small size of
Protestant and Irish samples (n l 285 and 270), a flaw in design, as we did
not anticipate so radical a reduction of fertility (discussed below).
We explored the potential impact on infant survival of the variables
listed in Table 1, as indicators of the environment surrounding the child.
From the birth record we established sex, twin births, and the cultural
identity.( Municipal rental valuations (for the taxe locatie) are an
excellent approximation of market rents and therefore a measure of
household purchasing power. From the same source we derived categories
of occupational status for the fathers (according to ranks of median rent
of all householders of the same occupation), an estimator for local
residential density (households per kilometre of street frontage), and an
indicator of the local social environment : street rent (that is, median rent
in the street segment).) The census, in addition to mothers age, provided
numbers in the household and rooms in the dwelling, hence an estimator
for crowding : the ratio of persons to rooms. Since segregation along
linguistic lines was considerable in 1900, the child is also situated in a
residential district characterized by the percentage of French-speaking
households.
For all three cultural communities, addresses were established for 95 per
cent, a rental value (from the taxroll) for 73 per cent, and a census match
for three-quarters (81 per cent of French Canadians). For multivariate
analyses which require reference to both census and taxroll, sample sizes
are, in all three groups, reduced to two-thirds.
The representativity of the sample can be appraised against a
corresponding sample of all households in the taxroll. We had used the
entire rental taxroll of May 1901 (65,000 households) to create a scale of
occupational status, to estimate residential densities and median rents for

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T 1
Infant mortality and sample sizes by cultural community and selected
independent ariables

French Canadian Irish Catholic Protestant

Col. Rate Col. Rate Col. Rate

N (%)a (%)b N (%) (%) N (%) (%)

Sex
Male 902 51.9 25.6 142 54.8 18.3 137 52.1 13.9
Female 835 48.1 20.6 117 45.2 12.8 126 47.9 15.9
Twin births
Singleton 1704 98.1 22.8 253 97.7 259 98.5
Twin 33 1.9 45.5 6 2.3 4 1.5
Household rent
High 208 15.6 23.6 57 29.5 7.0 77 39.7 13.0
Moderate 574 43.1 23.1 84 43.5 17.9 94 48.5 11.7
Low 550 41.3 22.8 52 26.9 19.2 23 11.9 17.4
Occupational status
High 276 16.0 22.8 57 22.1 17.5 75 29.4 14.7
Moderate 1018 58.9 24.0 150 58.1 14.7 147 57.6 12.9
Low 435 25.2 22.1 51 19.8 17.6 33 12.9 24.2
Density in street segment
High (
350\km) 623 37.0 24.2 54 22.0 13.0 36 14.5 13.9
Mod. (226350\km) 535 31.8 25.8 95 38.6 24.2 66 26.5 15.2
Low ( 225) 526 31.2 21.1 97 39.4 11.3 147 59.0 14.3
Rent in street
High ( $120) 169 10.3 23.7 64 26.3 7.8 86 36.9 14.0
Mod. ($61$119) 695 42.2 23.9 119 49.0 20.2 108 46.4 13.9
Low ($60 or less) 783 47.5 23.9 60 24.7 18.3 39 16.7 15.4
Room-crowding
 2 per room 231 16.9 19.9 24 12.0 10 5.1
2 per room 1133 83.1 22.2 176 88.0 187 94.9
District (% French)
 70 % 1366 82.6 24.8 111 45.7 19.8 81 34.0 13.6
4069 % 225 13.6 19.6 90 37.0 16.7 56 23.5 21.4
40 % 62 3.8 17.7 42 17.3 7.1 101 42.4 10.9

a Col. l column.
b Rate l deaths on days 2364 per 100 first-day survivors.

street segments, and to create a set of 50 relatively homogeneous districts.*

From that taxroll, a subset of 7800 households (12 per cent), drawn in the
same manner as the birth cohort (names in B and R), offers excellent
representation of rental values and geographic districts. Divided into
French- and English-speaking populations on the basis of their names and
surnames, that testbed assures us that the birth samples are good

98


representations of the two groups of urban households, and only the

highest stratum of rents is under-represented. Biases in the overall birth
sample with respect to rent, occupational status, population density, and
geographical distribution are attributable entirely to over-representation
of French Canadians, as a consequence of their higher birth rate
(discussed below).
When we undertook our study of the first cohort, we sought to establish
the time elapsed between birth and baptism, in order to assess the risk that
we might miss infants never baptized."! We extended our methods of
collection in Protestant records to accommodate baptisms as late as the
second year ; and we identified Catholics of Irish, English, and Scottish
origins (hereafter referred to for simplicity as Irish) for special attention
because all published tabulations have lumped them with other Anglo-
phones, or with other Catholics. While the problem of missing births
ultimately did not prove worrying, the control effort forced upon us a
cultural distinction which, we shall see, becomes a key to interpretation.
In Montreal few births or infant deaths went unrecorded. Even among
Protestants, infants in danger of death were promptly baptized. As Dr
Lachapelle put it in the first issue of his magazine La MeZ re et l Enfant in
1891, Le premier signe de vie est une inspiration, le dernier une
expiration ."" With such zeal did the clerics wield the quill that our
toughest problem was not missing births but an excess : Was there ever a
first breath ? What proportion of those baptized, anointed by the midwife
(ondoyeT ) or buried sans bapteV me, should be classed as stillbirths ? Those
judgements implicit in the creation of the records varied with religious
affiliation as well as medical practice,"# and our solution was to exclude
first-day deaths from the calculation of survival rates. First-day deaths
amounted to 5 to 8 per cent (lower for French Canadian, higher for
Protestant), and the sex ratios are very high, as they would be for a sample
of stillbirths : 248 male per 100 female for French Canadian ondoyeT s, 143
for Irish Catholic, 150 for Protestant."$ Once first-day deaths are removed
from both numerator and denominator, the sex ratio is 110 (108, 121, and
111 respectively), still somewhat higher than one would expect.
The strategy of excluding first-day deaths ensures a base-line for
comparison among the three communities, and these are the death rates
shown in Table 1 and all subsequent tables. The figures therefore
understate the Montreal mortality rate for comparison with other cities.
An infant mortality rate about 4 per cent higher would be appropriate for
comparison with rates for legitimates in other cities. It would be further
increased by inclusion of illegitimates, who amounted to 9 per cent of all
births in 1899 (12 in 1859, 13 in 1879) and suffered a death rate over 90
per cent. We excluded illegitimate births from our samples, because

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T 2
Strength of relationship between language group and other ariables,
1900

Pearson chi square

Cross-tabulated by language group Number of leels N # Df a Pb

Sex 2 2293 .71 1 0.398

Twin birth 2 2293 .23 1 0.634
Household rent 3 1719 100.70 2 0.000c
Occupational status 3 2242 34.00 2 0.000c
Density in street segment 3 2179 76.75 2 0.000c
Rent in street 3 2123 156.21 2 0.000c
Room-crowding 2 1761 16.86 1 0.000c
District  70 % French 2 2134 345.06 1 0.000c
Infant survival 2 2293 18.98 1 0.000c

a Df l degree of freedom.
b P l level of significance.
c Significant to 5 % level or better.

baptismal records of unknown parents cannot be matched with families

of residence."%
The three cohorts were chosen as windows on a surging process of
urbanization, bracketing building booms which peaked in 1872 and 1887,
synchronized with immigration from overseas and from farms in the
region. In each cohort, about half of French Canadian parents were born
in rural villages of the Plain of Montreal. As late as 1900, one-quarter of
English-speaking Catholic parents reported a birthplace in Ireland,
Scotland, England, or the United States ; and nearly half of Anglo-
Protestant parents were born in the Old Country, an additional 15 per
cent in Ontario or Maritime Canada. That there were so few Protestants
born in Quebec (comparable to the year 1860) suggests considerable out-
migration of the Protestant youth of Montreal and perhaps lower fertility
in the established local population than among immigrants. Renewal of
all three communities through surges of in-migration (notably in the mid-
1880s) contributed to the firmness of cultural identities and their low rates
of intermarriage.
.
In the cohorts of 1860 and 1880, the results flatly contradicted our original
hypothesis and forced us to reject social status as the prime determinant
of infant survival. In all models tested, the strongest factor was cultural
affiliation, and identification of the third culture provided a decisive test,

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T 3
Strength of relationship between surial and other ariables, by language
group, 1900a

Anglophone Francophone

Cross-tabulated by surial N # Dfb Pc N # Df P

Sex 522 .298 1 .585 1737 6.110 1 .013d

Twin birth 522 (9.446) 1 (.002)d 1737 9.349 1 .002d
Household rent 387 2.823 2 .244 1332 .048 2 .977
Occupational status 513 2.116 2 .347 1729 .658 2 .720
Density in street 495 4.438 2 .109 1684 3.352 2 .187
Rent in street 476 2.703 2 .259 1647 .004 2 .998
Room-crowding 397 (.943) 1 (.332) 1364 .609 1 .435
District  70 % French 481 .798 1 .372 1653 4.175 1 .041d

a Values in parentheses indicate some cells with small numbers.

b Df l degree of freedom.
c P l level of significance.
d Significant to 5 % level or better.

F 1 . Infant mortality rates (excluding first-day deaths), 1860, 1880 and 1900. All
rates are lower for 1880, but the three cohorts show a consistent pattern of higher mortality
among French Canadian infants (F), most apparent after the first month. The other cultural
communities identified are Irish Catholic (I) and Anglo-Protestant (P).

since Irish Catholic families showed the lowest profiles of rent and fathers
occupation, yet their infants survived as well as those in the Anglo-
Protestant sample with its high rents and higher occupational profile.
In dealing with each successive cohort, we reviewed the methodology,
experimented with alternative measures of status and conceivable
interaction effects. For the cohort of 1900, as well, we cannot explain

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F 2 . Occupational status and survival, Montreal, 1900. Bars indicate the distinctive
profile of occupational status in each of the three communities : a larger proportion of high-
status occupations (AB) among Protestants, a wide range among the Irish, more semi-skilled
(E) and labourers (F) among French Canadians. Dots show the erratic levels of infant
mortality in the subsamples (2364 days).

survival rates by biological differences associated with mothers age, rates

of twinning, or prematurity."& The statistical importance of differences
between English- and French-speaking families, with respect to profiles of
rents and occupational status, can be seen in Table 2, but Table 3 shows
that those variables had no significant impact on infant survival. Other
than the linguistic affiliation of the family, the sole social variable with a
significant impact is ethnic concentration in the district of residence, and
the survival rates shown in Table 1 pinpoint the effects of three levels of
concentration for the three cultural groups. Most French Canadian

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T 4
Infant mortality in Montreal by cultural community, 1900a

French Irish Protestant All

Rate Rate Rate Rate

N (%) N (%) N (%) N (%)

Births 1808 270 285 2397

First-day survivors 1739 259 271 2303
Sex ratio (M\100F) 108 121 111 110
Neonatal deaths (228 days) 64 3.7 4 1.5 14 5.2 83 3.6
Post-neonatal deaths (29364 days) 330 19.0 36 13.9 31 11.4 398 17.3
Infant deaths (2364 days) 394 22.7 40 15.4 15 16.6 481 20.9
First-day deaths (excl. stillbirths) 69 3.8 11 4.1 14 4.9 94 3.9
Infant deaths (1364 days) 463 25.6 51 18.9 59 20.7 575 24.0
Deaths of 2-year-olds 103 5.9 13 5.0 4 1.5 122 5.3

a All these figures exclude 27 infants designated as stillborn : columns All include 34
infants of Jewish and other cultural groups.

infants lived in solidly French neighbourhoods (70100 per cent) with high
mortality rates, but living in a mixed (4069 per cent) or anglophone-
dominated neighbourhood ( 40 per cent French) brought their survival
rates up to the anglophone average. The neighbourhood effect is also
apparent for Irish Catholic infants, who more often lived in mixed
neighbourhoods, but ambiguous for Protestant infants.
In other words, despite evidence from studies elsewhere, Montreal
families in the top-ranking third of the occupational profile were no more
successful than labourers of the same cultural group in protecting their
infants. The results are consistent in the three cohorts (see Figures 1 and
2). If cultural identities and degrees of cultural segregation had a more
powerful impact on an infants chances than material conditions,"' we
must look more closely at what constitutes culture. It is obviously
something richer and more complicated than what is implied in a cross-
tabulation of religion and language. What cultural practices might have
affected infant survival in Montreal ?
Let us simplify the discussion by focusing on the cohort of 1900 (see
Table 4). Of infants who survived the first day, 20.9 per cent died within
the first year, almost identical with the cohort of 1860, and, despite some
success in campaigns against smallpox (to be discussed), infant mortality
remained as threatening in Montreal as 40 years previously (Table 5)."(
Neonatal mortality (days 228), of the order of 3 to 5 per cent except for
the Irish, varied relatively little, but for post-neonatal deaths (days

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T 5
Comparatie mortality in the three birth cohorts

French Irish Protestant All

1860 1880 1900 1860 1880 1900 1860 1880 1900 1860 1880 1900

Mortality rate (%)

104

Post-neonatal (29364 days) 21.2 15.8 19.0 13.7 10.4 13.9 13.2 10.6 11.4 17.7 14.3 17.3
Neonatal (228 days) 4.0 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.3 1.5 3.8 3.7 5.2 3.9 3.7 3.6
Infant (2364 days) 25.2 19.4 22.7 17.5 13.7 15.4 17.0 14.8 16.6 21.1 18.0 20.9
Index of variation
Post-neonatal (29364 days) 100 100 100 65 66 73 62 67 60 100 81 98
Neonatal (228 days) 100 100 100 95 92 41 95 103 141 100 95 92
Infant (2364 days) 100 100 100 69 71 68 67 76 73 100 85 99


T 6
Numbers of deaths by reported causes, 1880 and 1900, days 2364

1880 1900 1880 1900

Contagious 58 22 Intestinal 278 210

Whooping cough 4 15 Infant cholera 63 20
Diphtheria 4 2 Cholera 27
Measles 18 2 Diarrhoea 136 67
Scarlet fever 3 3 Enteritis 32 75
Chickenpox 8 Gastritis 2 2
Smallpox 17 Teething 30 12
Erysipelas 4 Haemorrhage of intestines 2 1
Inflammation of intestines 5 5
Delivery 38 23 Milk 1
Asphyxia 5 1 Dysentery 7
Asthenia 2 Typhoid fever 1
Cyanosis 4 1
Dystocie 2 Respiratory 62 57
Heart disease 4 1 Bronchitis 33 24
Jaundice 2 1 Croup 5 2
Premature 16 7 Grippe 1 1
Spina bifida 1 7 Lung disease 13 2
Eclampsia 3 1 Pneumonia 8 28
Puerperal fever 2 Laryngitis 2
Syphilis hereditary 1
Tubercular 31 34
Hydrocephaly 110 15 Meningitis 21 26
Convulsions 52 13 Scrofula 2 1
Hydrocephaly 18 1 Tuberculosis 8 7
Brain fever 30 1
Encephalitis 7 Other 9 8
Mal de te# te 3 Accident 2
Nephritis 1 1
Weakness 157 96 Paralysis 1
Anaemia 4 Urinary 1 2
Atrophy 14 Tabes mysenteria 4
Debility 133 61 Other 3 2
Faiblesse 20 9
Marasme 4 8 No report 34 18

29364) the gap was very large between the French Canadian and the
other two populations (19.0 per cent versus 13.9 and 11.4), resulting in a
much higher French Canadian infant mortality rate (22.7 per cent versus
15.4 and 16.6).
In order to make sense of the differences, we explored the seasons, ages,
and causes of death. Of 481 infant deaths in the 1900 cohort, a cause was

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T 7
Causes of death summarized for the three cultural communities, 1880 and
1900

French Irish Protestant Total

1880 1900 1880 1900 1880 1900 1880 1900

Contagious 39 18 8 3 11 1 58 22
Delivery 29 20 4 1 6 2 39 23
Hydrocephaly 61 13 25 1 24 1 110 15
Intestinal 191 187 43 14 45 9 279 210
Weakness 100 75 15 10 41 11 156 96
Respiratory 40 47 13 5 10 5 63 57
Tubercular 22 29 5 3 4 2 31 34
Other 6 4 2 2 1 2 9 8
Total 488 393 115 39 142 33 745 465
No report 20 11 3 1 11 6 34 18

reported for 96 per cent, and the reported causes were grouped to
highlight environmental factors (see Tables 6 and 7).") As shown in Figure
3, identification of causes had improved, vague and symptomatic rubrics
such as debility, weakness and convulsions forming a smaller proportion
in 1900."* Health Department tabulations over a half-century (see Figure
4) show the important decline of smallpox since 1885, of mortality from
several other childhood diseases after 1900, from diarrhoeal diseases after
1910.#!
Among sample infants of the 1900 cohort, nearly half of infant deaths
after the first day were attributed to intestinal causes such as diarrhoea
and infant cholera (see Table 8), and precisely half of all the deaths
occurred in the summer quarter of the year (June, July, or August). Of
deaths reported as intestinal, 71 per cent occurred in the summer quarter,
thus seasonality is a strong diagnostic of diarrhoeal infections as either a
primary or secondary cause of death. This corresponds to what Woods
and others have described in cities of nineteenth-century Britain.#" In the
Montreal samples, as shown in Table 8, these effects were most
pronounced among French Canadian infants (51.9 per cent of deaths in
summer, 47.6 per cent intestinal) where diarrhoeal mortality amounted to
one-tenth of all births. Deaths of Irish Catholic infants were less often
attributed to intestinal causes (one case in 20 births), but were just as likely
to occur in the summer quarter. For Protestants summer concentration
was almost nil, and only one infant in 30 died of diarrhoeal causes.

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T 8
Comparatie season and cause of death, 1880 and 1900

French Irish Protestant All

Infant deaths (2364 days) 1880 1900 1880 1900 1880 1900 1880 1900

Deaths in summer quarter

(JJA) as % of all deaths 43.1 51.9 44.3 48.7 44.9 28.9 43.6 49.8
Deaths from intestinal
diseases as % of all deaths 37.1 47.6 35.2 36.8 28.8 28.1 35.1 45.4
Diarrhoeal death rate per
100 first-day survivors 7.2 10.8 4.9 5.1 4.3 3.4 6.1 9.1

F 3 . Selected causes by age at death, 1880 and 1900 (excludes first-day deaths).
Death records for the two infant cohorts show improvement in identification of causes,
vague and symptomatic rubrics such as teething, weakness, and convulsions forming a
smaller proportion in 1900.

The concentrations of diarrhoeal causes and summer-quarter deaths

were decidedly higher in 1900 than in 1880, and the rate of diarrhoeal
mortality had increased from 6.1 to 9.3 per cent of live births (see Table
8). Only for Protestants did it actually decline. The increase affected all
ages, but not in the same degree (see Figure 3). In 1880 the share of

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F 4 . Selected causes of infant deaths, 18761925. (Source : Annual Reports of the

Montreal Board of Health, 18761925.)

diarrhoeal deaths was highest at six to eight months, in 1900 at three to

five months, and the impact on even younger infants had increased.##
Summer incidence was selective, affecting infants from both language
groups about equally at ages six to eight months (56.3 as opposed to 60.0
per cent), whereas under the age of six months summer incidence was
nearly double in the French Canadian sample (48.9 as opposed to 29.2 per
cent among anglophones).
Of the infants who died (days 2364), the longer mean lifetime for Irish
Catholic infants (5.9 months as opposed to 4.1 for Protestant and 4.6 for
French Canadian) suggests that the Irish Catholic infants were weaned
later. If we employ the Bourgeois-Pichat biometric to display the death
rates as a function of age (see Figure 5), the cultural divergence in 1900 is
as pronounced as in earlier cohorts, with an increase in slope for French
Canadians from the third month, for Irish Catholics in the seventh.
European examples have shown that such deviations from the linear
norm can be generated by sequences of low mortality during
breastfeeding, followed by steeply rising mortality at weaning.#$ Curves
calculated for the set of summer deaths as against the other nine months
of the year (see Figure 6, standardized to a 12-month index) shows that it
was indeed summer mortality which generated the deviations.
Since differential survival is not explained by biological differences, the
widening cultural gap reflects a differential vulnerability of the three
groups to their environments ; and all the evidence of seasons and causes
suggests that the cultural differentials, winnowing the cohort month by

108


F 5 . Biometric analysis of infant deaths, 1900. Trend shows the divergence of death
rates for French Canadian infants, with the steeper slopes after three months, a divergence
for Irish Catholics after seven months. The Bourgeois-Pichat formula has been modified to
start from the day after birth.

F 6 . Biometric analysis of infant deaths, 1900 (by season). The steep curve for
summer deaths can be compared with the other nine months of the year, by standardizing
both rates to a 12-month basis.

109


month, arose from differential incidence of what we now call weanling

diarrhoea . A nineteenth-century city like Montreal resembled a develop-
ing economy, and its environmental hazards were those we associate with
tropical cities of poor infrastructure and massive poverty : dirty water,
ineffectual disposal of human waste and garbage, proliferation of flies,
and bacterial growth at warm temperatures. In the 1860 cohort we could
discern negative effects of living in houses in courtyards and alleys, and in
the 1880 cohort a negative impact of high residential density.#%
High density on the ground, measured as households per kilometre of
street frontage, has to be distinguished from crowding within the dwelling,
assessed as rooms per person. The new higher-stacked dwellings were a
little larger (four and five rooms instead of three or four), so that crowding
was diminishing, and these trends might have contradictory impacts on
mortality, since one would expect more space to reduce respiratory and
contact transmission of contagious diseases, while higher urban densities
would aggravate the incidence of diseases of filth transmitted through
the digestive tract, most threatening to infants in their first year. This is
where the exercise was disappointing. While the summer disease does
seem to have intensified, our ambitions of disentangling the environmental
variables and distinguishing effects of purchasing power from quality of
the habitat are confounded by small sample sizes for the low-mortality
populations, and by the limited nature of combinations of cultural
affiliations and habitats. The degree of segregation by purchasing power
was such that in 1900 half of all households were paying middling rents
in middling streets, no high-rent families were living in low-rent streets,
and very few low-rent households (5 per cent) were living in high-rent
streets. In the same way, high-rent streets were rarely of high density, and
severe crowding (two or more persons per room) was rare among high-
rent households.
While any multivariate treatment is severely constrained by those
intercorrelations, we explored an array of categorical models. For the set
of infants who survived the first day, the dependent variable is survival to
one year.#& All models confirmed the well-known disadvantages of twin
birth and male sex ; none showed environmental effects as statistically
significant, but cultural affiliation is always substantial and significant.
Even the best model is of meagre predictive power, but shows the added
impact of cultural dominance in the district. As shown in Table 9, chances
are improved for the female child over the male by a factor of 1.3, and for
a twin reduced by one-third. A child s survival odds are improved by
belonging to an English-speaking family (by a factor of 1.3), and further
improved (1.15) when the family lived in a district with at least 30 per cent
English-speaking households. Like the other effects, the two cultural

110


T 9
Odds ratios for infant surial in logistic model, 1900

Likelihood ratio assessment

Independent
ariables Change in odds P N Constants only k2log LR Df # P

Anglo home 1.317 .004 2214 k112.55 k1103.39 38.32 4 .000

Twin .335 .001
Sex female 1.304 .012
Mixed district 1.154 .036

dimensions are independent and cumulative. Once both are taken into
account the cultural identity of the family and the district no other
environmental characteristics show any further impact. The scale at which
neighbourhood is specified seems to be important, since no mortality
differentials can be discerned from properties of the street segment, nor
from properties of the dwelling itself.
Over 40 years there was no apparent improvement in infant survival,
and the differentiating cause was more acute in 1900 : early weaning in an
unsanitary urban environment. In such habitats, historical demographers
have long recognized the protective effects of breastfeeding,#' and scholars
in recent years have given increasing attention to its cultural, social, and
regional variations. A shift in scale of analysis from national aggregates to
localized microstudies has revealed a wide range of factors which
differentiate maternal behaviours in finely textured cultural milieus.#( To
estimate the extent and variations of breastfeeding in Montreal, we turn
to the analysis of birth spacing, which may also be informative with
respect to trends in fertility.

.
For the cohort of 1900, fertility is of considerable interest because these
families were on the cusp of change. In light of McInnis evidence for a
fertility transition apparent by 1891 in Ontario, the multicultural
metropolis is a particular challenge, and Montreal appears on his map as
a fulcrum of change. To obtain nation-wide coverage, McInnis had to rely
on census ratios of young children in households, an indicator whose
adjustment is especially difficult in a population where the cultural mix in
a census enumeration district affected infant deaths as well as births.#) Our
1900 cohort, where birth and death rates can be independently established
for each cultural group, confirms his notion of two cultures of child-

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T 10
Age at marriage of parents of infants, 1880 and 1900

French Irish Protestant

1880 1900 1880 1900 1880 1900

Women married 21 (%) 58.9 53.7 41.9 38.0 52.4 37.8

Women married  25 (%) 5.5 12.8 14.3 20.2 6.5 17.8
Men married 21 (%) 21.3 11.2 8.7
Men married  25 (%) 28.5 42.9 40.2

bearing , nuances it by introducing a third (the Irish Catholic), and points

again to the primacy of cultural factors.
In order to appraise fertility, we need to control for mothers age. As
compared with earlier cohorts, the mothers of 1900 had married later in
life (see Table 10) and French Canadian women were marrying younger
than women in other groups, 54 per cent by the legal age of majority (21),
two-thirds by age 22. Protestant and Irish Catholic mothers were
marrying a little later, two-thirds by age 24, with somewhat greater
concentration of the Irish in the window 2124 years. Despite later
marriage, we find little difference among the three samples with respect to
the median age of mothers at the time of the birth of the sample child
(French 28.6 years, Irish 29.0, Protestant 29.4), and, in all three groups,
recent marriages account for the preponderance of births. Of 1568
mothers for whom we have a marriage date, about half were married in
the 7.5 years prior to the census. While the high proportion born of recent
marriages was doubtless associated with the greater fecundability of
younger women, it was reinforced by the large number of parental deaths
which interrupted the natural course of marital fertility. In the 650
families still present in Montreal but with no next child recorded in the
span of observation (41 per cent), we were able to confirm the fathers
death in 6 per cent of cases, the mothers death in 10 per cent, together
one-sixth.
The death of either parent may have been a factor in survival of the
infant. Of deaths of married persons under 50 in the five years of
observation, one-third were attributed to tuberculosis, and for women an
additional 18 per cent to childbirth.#* We encounter numerous mothers
like De! lima who bore her tenth child at the age of 30 ; as the child was an
ondoyeT , it may have been a difficult birth, and De! lima died a few months
later from tuberculosis. A decade later a commission investigating the

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T 11
Median birth interals by cohort and community

French Irish Protestant

Birth interals in months 1860 1880 1900 1860 1880 1900 1860 1880 1900

First child died 1 year 16.9 16.2 16.0 18.6 20.4 16.2 18.4 18.1 19.4
First child survived 1 year 25.0 22.1 21.5 25.8 24.6 23.8 23.5 24.4 25.3
Next born in 18 months (%) 11.4 27.5 33.2 11.2 13.0 21.7 17.6 23.2 19.4

prevalence of tuberculosis in Quebec reported higher rates among French

Canadians and especially among women, and the doctors on the
commission made the interpretation : Serious neglect of hygienic
precautions in the days immediately following childbirth results in a
pronounced lowering of vitality .$!
As expected, we observe shorter birth intervals among mothers whose
infants died under one year (see Table 11), due to the hormonal brake
which breastfeeding exerts on ovulation.$" The lactation effect, apparent
by comparison of distributions of birth intervals for French Canadian
mothers in Figure 7, can be observed in all three communities, and is more
prominent among Irish Catholic mothers. To make an interpretation of
the extent of breastfeeding, we ignore cases where the infant died young
(the first line of Table 11), and look only at cases where the target child
survived the year (the second line). For 1900 we see a median interval two
months longer among Irish Catholic women, and four months longer
among Protestant women, relative to French Canadian women. The last
line of the table reports the percentage of survivor cases where a next child
was born within 18 months. Consistent with observations of Desjardins et
al., this can be treated as an estimate of the percentages of mothers
nonbreastfeeding ,$# suggestive at least of a trend toward earlier weaning
or supplementation, practiced in 1900 by as many as a third of French
Canadian mothers, a fifth of the others. Among French Canadian mothers
the change is apparent by 1880, among Irish mothers it represents a
marked increase after 1880. In British towns, Huck argued in 1997, even
a small decrease in the proportion breastfeeding, say 10 per cent, would
be enough to account for the persistence of high mortality and a summer
peak.$$
When it comes to mothers reasons for artificial or supplemental
feeding, we can only speculate. Factory work does not seem to have been
common among married women in Montreal. Massive immigration from
the countryside suggests that women were following traditional norms

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(a) Child died in first year

(b) Child survived first year

F 7 . Birth intervals in French Canadian sample families. When a child died very
young, the mother was likely to have another within 12 to 16 months, as shown above for
French Canadian families in the sample associated with the birth cohort of 1900. Where
infants survived to 12 months (b) we see longer intervals between births (16 to 24 months).
One can infer a lactation effect, and the short intervals (less than 18 months) may reflect the
earlier return of fertility in women who were not breastfeeding.

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F 8 . Marital fertility in 1900. Mothers of the birth cohort of 1900 are grouped by age
and cultural origin, to show how many bore another child within 33 months. Among
Protestant women fertility was notably lower and declined with age.

which in rural habitats had less tragic consequences. Problems in the

health of the mother were doubtless more frequent in the city (infections
of the breast, undernourishment, anemia, lung diseases),$% and in-
terruption of maternal breastfeeding was sanctioned by the ancient
tradition of blaming the mother for a baby who did not thrive : You dont
have enough milk , or Your milk isnt good. Even the most progressive
of doctors at the end of the century recommended that for a child not
thriving, the mothers milk should be analyzed.$&
For Anglo-Protestant mothers, we suspect that the declining proportion
of short intervals ( 18 months), as shown on the last line of Table 11,
reflects active attempts at a desired spacing rather than a change of feeding
practices. This surmise is reinforced by hints of stopping behaviour, longer
spacing after an infant death, and the way these behaviours varied with
the womans age. Grouping the mothers into five-year age sets, we display
in Figure 8 the percentages who bore another child within 33 months of
the first.$' The overall rates varied in the three communities : French
Canadian 68, Irish Catholic 63, and Protestant 43 per cent. For French
Canadian women, the repeater rates began falling when they reached their
mid-thirties, for others as early as their mid-twenties, and the reduction
among Protestant women is apparent in each successive age group. For
the entire set of older mothers (
35), we found no next birth for 45 per
cent, among younger mothers only 20.5 per cent. The cultural differentials
among older women suggest attempts to limit family size.
The first line of Table 11 shows differences in median birth intervals
following a child who died in the first year. Half of French Canadian
mothers bore another within sixteen months in 1900, as in 1860 and 1880 ;
Irish mothers of 1900 showed equally prompt replacement (not observed
earlier), while 19.4 months elapsed before half of Protestant mothers had
borne their next child a longer interval than before, longer than can be
attributed to natural fertility. Median and mean do not reveal the full

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(a) Fertility, francophone (b) Fertility, anglophone

F 9 . Ratios of births to households by district and language group. Francophone

populations (a) show higher values (mean 36 per cent) and seem to be approaching a limit,
while district values for anglophones (b) are normally distributed around a mean of 26 per
cent.

nuances (apparent in Figure 7), and French Canadian mothers, in

addition to the numerous short intervals (1216 months), show a
bimodality more pronounced in 1900 than 1880, which reflects the
difference between younger and older mothers.
In other words, both stopping and spacing behaviours seem present
in the Protestant sample, and the oncoming revolution in fertility takes a
different expression in the three groups. From the taxroll sample of names
in B and R, divided into names of francophone and anglophone
consonance, we estimated the number of households in each district, and
derived a ratio of births to households. In the span of two years, a birth
was recorded to more than one-third of francophone households (36 per
cent), to only one-quarter of anglophone households (26 per cent), as
distributed for the 50 districts in Figure 9. For Protestant households the
value may be as low as one-fifth.$(

.
As we saw in the analysis of mortality, the cultural dimension had a
double impact, and we need to explain both the cultural differences and
their expression at the scale of a neighbourhood. Interpretation is
necessarily more speculative. To crack open the cultural package, we first
propose a representation of infant survival as part of a demographic
system . We then look more closely at the spatial incidence of infant
mortality, and the significance of residential segregation in the politics of
the city. Political discrimination, we argue, affected sanitary conditions,

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T 12
Estimates for strategic ariables by cultural community, 1900

Parameters in Figure 10 Sourcesa French Irish Protestant

Infant death rate (2364 days) (%) a 22.7 15.4 16.6

Choice of dwelling
Household rent (median $\yr) a 70 84 100
Mean rooms in dwelling a 5.0 5.4 6.1
Rent in street of residence a
High (%  $120\yr) 16 30 40
Moderate (% $61$119\yr) 41 44 48
Low (%
$60\yr) 43 27 12
District  70 % French (%) a 83 46 34
Education
School budget per birth ($\yr) c 20 20 102
Household head cannot read (%) b 20 4 3
Age at marriage
Men (% married
25) a 29 43 40
Women (% married 21) a 54 38 38
Household earning capacity
Mean household size a 6.0 5.9 5.5
Dependency (% 15 or
60) b 44 38 37
Household earnings : % contributed
by 1529 year-olds b 27 35 28
Birth spacing (median in months) a 21.5 23.8 25.3
Breastfeeding (% intervals  18 months) a 66.8 78.3 80.6
Mothers health
TB deaths\100,000 pop. 18961906 d 201 149
Vaccination e Mod. High High

a Sources : a : Birth cohort of 1900 ; b : Samples of 12 surnames (366 households) ; c :

Montreal Annual Report of the Treasurer, 1899 ; d : Report of the Royal Commission on
Tuberculosis, 190910 ; e : Farley et al., La vaccination (see note 61).

resource allocation to component populations, and even the attitudes

people held towards what was within their reach.

The cultural package

With respect to both fertility and infant mortality, the central question is
how mothering was worked into the cultural package. Although we can
estimate the prevalence and length of breastfeeding by observing the
lactation effect, the cultural complex of breastfeeding extends to aspects of
mothering which are more difficult for the historian to assess, such as
levels of hygiene, the food supplements given to babies, and the ages at
which they were introduced.$) Studies in present-day Africa, Asia, and

117


Latin America expand our understanding of cultural factors such as the

ways mothers nourish and care for infants, their recipes and techniques of
food preparation, substitution of foods, and management of diarrhoea.
Does a woman listen to the doctor, to the nurse, or to her mother and her
mother-in-law ? Cultural norms for the care given to mothers have been
shown to be important with regard to her nutrition in pregnancy and
lactation, the attitudes of her husband, and restrictions on the nursing
mothers diet or sexual activity.$* Public health agents today argue that
child-saving interventions require alteration of a socio-cultural system.%!
In nineteenth-century Montreal, doctors were promoting breastfeeding :
le biberon, voila' la vraie cause de la mortalite! excessive des nouveau-ne!
pendant les grandes chaleurs. Le vrai reme' de, l unique reme' de, cest
l allaitement maternel .%" And their volumes of advice rail against
traditional practices which were presumably common enough to merit the
warnings : brandy as a remedy for the newborn who did not promptly take
the breast, alcohol as a stimulant for mothers milk, derivatives of alcohol
or opium for the fretful infant, and the English practice of lancing the
gums of a teething baby. But certain recommendations of even progressive
doctors of the 1890s would today be questioned : rubbing the gums with
ice grated with sugar, or with preparations of chloroform, belladona,
cocaine or laudanum.%# Some recommended enemas for infant digestive
troubles, and taking urgent means against an intestinal attack by
suspending feeding or giving a purge.%$ Such measures we now know
would hasten dehydration, the immediate cause of most deaths from
weanling diarrhoea.
Since Irish Catholics, with their higher-than-expected rate of infant
survival, displayed a distinctive array of behaviours (see Table 12), we
attempt in Figure 10 a schematic illustration of the cultural package.
There is a swirl of positive feedbacks in the classic maternal factors : Irish
mothers appear to have breastfed their infants somewhat longer, and
births were spread further apart, with advantages to the health of the
mother, the newborn, and the nextborn. Another suite of positive
feedbacks is lodged in the home environment. Choice of a dwelling was
enhanced by later marriage, which allowed the Irish couple to accumulate
savings, or to share a larger household with more wage-earners ; and more
of their children lived to an age at which they could contribute to
household income. Not all of the feedbacks were fully understood, but
many key variables reflect conscious strategies, well articulated (as in the
support for schools and participation in literary and temperance societies)
and widely agreed-upon, as evidenced by the extent to which Irish families
were, by 1900, living in streets of higher rents, higher status, larger
dwellings, and lower densities.

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F 1 0 . Strategies affecting infant survival. We display key variables which appear to

have favoured survival among Irish Catholic infants. All are affected by cultural tradition,
but respond to the intercultural context and urban environment of the moment. See Table
12 for estimates of the differentials between cultural communities in Montreal about 1900.
Variables are shaded to match the WilliamsGalley model shown in the inset.

119


In other words, infant survival was part of a well-buffered system whose

stability was based on a shared culture.%% Each cultural community,
through its combination of demographic behaviour and housing
strategies, and its pattern of integration into the urban economy,
possessed a distinct set of adaptive capacities. Irish Catholic parents of the
first cohort (1860) were immigrants, 40 per cent labourers, often forced to
place their older children in farm labour or domestic service, while the
Canadian-born fathers of the third cohort were rarely labourers, young
women were rarely servants, and families were keeping their children at
home till they came of age.
If we situate these components in the framework of Williams and
Galley, as in the inset in Figure 10, we see three layers of protection
surrounding the infant : the mother, the home environment, and the public
environment.%& The prevalence of summer diarrhoea demonstrates
deficiencies in the public environment of late-nineteenth-century
Montreal, but the Irish Catholic community was supplying countervailing
defences in the maternal and home environments. We must look now at
variations in the quality of the public environment.

Differentiated spaces
The urban space was not shared on an equal basis. Nineteenth-century
medical topographers took account of segregation along lines of culture
and wealth as well as the lay of the land, microclimates, and sources of
pollution,%' and Montreal doctors were aware, even at the time of our first
cohort, of the citys excessive mortality , the air poisoning months , and
the deaths of infants and children as a very sensitive test of sanitary
circumstances .%(
In 1900, segregation along linguistic lines was considerable. Most
districts had high percentages of one language group or the other, so that
the pattern departed from a normal bivariate distribution (see Figure 11),
and infant mortality rates in the 50 districts reflected the cultural split. In
1900, since the Anglo-Protestant population so strongly dominated the
high-rent housing stock (over six rooms), and French Canadians the low-
rent stock (see Table 1),%) the overall map of infant mortality also
corresponded in some measure with social class. But we have already seen
that a consistent class effect cannot be detected in the data for individuals.
If we map infant death rates for the two linguistic communities
separately (see Figure 12), we discover anomalies. Some districts show
relatively high mortality for both groups (Hochelaga, parts of Saint-
Henri, and Saint-Jacques). Mortality is relatively low for both groups on
the high-rent flank of Mount Royal, known as The Golden Square Mile ,

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F 1 1 . Percentage of francophone households in each district. Cross-hatched are the

solidly francophone district (70 per cent or more). Identified in outline are the business
district (now Old Montreal ) and concentrations of Irish Catholics and, in the garment
district, of Jewish immigrants. The histogram inset shows the departure from a normal
distribution.

but also in Saint-Gabriel ward, a low-lying district south of the Lachine

Canal with low rents, newer housing, and a strong presence of both
Anglo-Protestant immigrants and Irish Catholics. As demonstrated in the
statistical model, French Canadian infants living in districts with a
substantial anglophone population were more likely to survive, while
anglophone babies who lived in high-density French Canadian neighbour-
hoods were less likely to survive. In the emerging garment district, infant
mortality was low among the Jewish immigrants, but the Irish Catholic,
Anglo-Protestant, and French Canadian populations who shared the
district displayed higher-than-expected mortality. For contagions like
smallpox or measles, one might interpret the disadvantage of the solidly
French Canadian neighbourhood as a consequence of higher rates of
exposure, but our focus on a summer disease or disease of filth
demands consideration of the ways in which municipal government
intervened in the public environment .

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F 1 2 . Infant mortality rates in the urban area. Mortality rates (days 2364) are
separately mapped by 50 districts for francophone sample (above) and anglophone sample
(below), and the histograms show the numbers of districts at various levels of mortality.

122


The exercise of power

The sanitary topography mirrored a geopolitics. Property qualifications
restricted the right to hold office to fewer than 3 per cent of household
heads.%* Linteau has documented the dominance of business interests
among aldermen (7075 per cent, whether French, Irish, or Anglo-
Protestant in origin), and Simard has shown that virtually all anglophone
aldermen lived in the Golden Square Mile, and nearly all francophone
aldermen along the Saint-Denis street axis, rather than in the wards they
represented .&! The pattern persisted from 1880 to 1900 and matches the
distribution of streets of high median rents and professional residence.
Except for property-owning widows, women were deprived of the vote, as
were adult sons, boarders, and live-in servants. Down to 1886 one-fifth of
household heads (13,000 tenants) were disenfranchized by a statute labour
tax which was never exacted of property owners,&" and as late as 1900 the
poorest 2 per cent lost both their water and their vote because they could
not pay the regressive water tax . Byzantine provisions of the city charter
confirm the privileges of business. A milliner, for example, who married
under a re! gime of common property could not vote, but her husband had
a right to an extra ballot in the ward where she had her shop. Large
landlords, partners in a law firm, or treasurers of corporations like the
Bank of Montreal, the Grand Trunk Railway, or Canadian Rubber were
entitled to cast votes for aldermen in every ward in which the business
occupied a property.&#
In the 1890s, growth of the French Canadian population (by rural in-
migration, natural increase, and annexations) allowed French Canadians
to begin electing the majority of aldermen, often realtors, notaries, and
construction entrepreneurs whose priorities were in the style of the New
York City political machine , ensuring their own re-election by
distributing municipal contracts for scavenging and paving, with pick-
and-shovel jobs for the poor, profits for the well-heeled, and kickbacks for
themselves. The most durable operated from a power base in the Roads
Committee who by 1900 controlled $450,000 of annual spending.
The infant cohort of 1900 was born at a moment of agitation over
municipal reform. Although the reformers Volunteer Electoral League
was ephemeral, their presence in debates in the City Council in 1900
clarifies the workings of municipal politics in Montreal. The reformers
adopted a rhetoric of sanitation, and their leader was nicknamed water-
closet Ames , but the League was more interested in economy of spending,
and its anglophone power base insisted upon distribution of municipal
jobs and contracts according to ethnicity, replacing the Protestant
constable with a Protestant, and promoting French Canadian or Irish

123


Catholic firemen in exact proportion. The Leagues financial backers in

the 1899 campaign voted at downtown head offices at Place d Armes and
Victoria Square ; they employed low-wage French Canadian operatives
confined to the East End, while they themselves lived in West End
neighbourhoods from which they excluded industrial and commercial
activity. It was understood that he who paid the piper would call the tune,
and Anglo-Protestants, about one-quarter of the Citys population,
owned the most profitable business and industrial properties, and were
therefore recorded as paying half the taxes. On the question of a special
tax for sidewalks, Ames pointed out that his ward (Saint-Antoine) would
be paying one-third of the whole, and his electors rightly demand
assurances that the money be equitably distributed , that is half in the
Western Division of the City. This has been customary in the past, and
should not be deviated from in the future.&$
The resulting distribution of municipal resources was profoundly
inequitable. Property tax was allocated to Catholic or Protestant schools
on the basis of the religion of the property owner. The Star considered
discussion of this not in good taste , but the inequity was deepening, and
in 1899 the school budget ($320,000, somewhat less than the roads budget)
went half to the Protestant board, who represented one-quarter of the
population and only one-sixth of the children. In terms of funds budgeted
per child born that year, the Protestant baby was assured five times the
amount for a Catholic baby.&% Ethnic geopolitics determined the
geographies of tree-planting, pigs, taverns, and disorderly houses ,&&
all of which were indicative of municipal priorities : a powerful and
consistent discrimination as to whose need was articulated and whose
voice was heard.
As a consequence, the public environment of Montreal was not
uniformly bad ; it varied. The Western Division of the City contained
people of all social classes, arrayed in the terraced landscape like a great
flight of stairs from Mount Royal to the River. Bounded on the west by
Atwater Avenue and on the east by St Lawrence Main Street, the entire
Division was characterized by the presence of more than 40 per cent
anglophone households, and the differential in environmental quality was
reflected in consistently higher rents for dwellings of a given size.&' The
Irish were nudging their way into these better-managed environments
where public resources were concentrated. By 1900 they had diffused
widely from the old Griffintown core and integrated more closely with
Protestants in environments which the e! lite had reserved and protected.
Irish access to healthier habitats was achieved not solely by family
decisions on housing, but by their participation in municipal politics. As
early as 1832, Irish Catholic leaders had demonstrated an ability to swing

124


elections between polarized French and English parties. By the 1860s

Irish Catholic involvement in unions was high, and they possessed an
articulate press and were represented at all levels of government. Linteau
documents the substantial Irish membership in the City Council by the
late 1860s, and its erosion in the 1890s. Irish Catholics manoeuvred
coalitions with francophones who shared their religion, and with
Protestants, who, increasingly, needed Irish Catholic votes to preserve a
shrinking electoral base.&(
The business orientation of the municipal corporation had especially
negative effects on French Canadian infants. While social class does not
seem to have been a statistical determinant of mortality rates, capitalist
decision-makers, largely Anglo-Protestant, were maintaining an economy
of low wages, low rents, cultural segregation, spatial rules for public
investment, and minimal expenditure on municipal services. In the
cultural context of Montreal, they were generating risks for French
Canadian infants without perceptible consequences for their own. What
Dr Carpenter in 1869 called the slaughter of the innocents in Montreal
had continued year after year.&) Only in the next generation (19101930)
would we begin to see public resources directed to improving public
environments in the solidly French Canadian neighbourhoods drains,
chlorination of water, and more effective scavenging over a large
area with some impact on infant survival.&*

A whiff of modernity
The geopolitics which framed the public environment had also an effect on
the attitudes which influenced maternal and family environments. In
reassessing the reasons for the secular decline in both fertility and infant
mortality, scholars have argued the critical importance of attitudes. High
mortality was long fostered by what seemed to be a fatalistic out-
look Its God s will and high fertility likewise as many as God
sends . Reinhard Sprees analysis of inequalities in mortality and
morbidity in Imperial Germany argues for the rise of an instrumental
rationality and an emerging determination to control environments of
home and work.'!
Pertinent to the emergence of such an instrumental rationality are the
mortality experiences of successive generations of parents. Mothers and
fathers of our third Montreal cohort were survivors of a smallpox
epidemic which in 1885 killed 3259 people and left scars, not only on their
faces but on the whole of the body politic. Internationally, smallpox was
the first disease which responded to a public re! gime of vaccination, but
Montreal had not yet put in place the full arsenal of tools required for

125


consistent system management. The annual allotment for sanitation

amounted to less than 1 per cent of the Corporations budget ; in so
seasonal a climate, municipal sanitation and always been treated as a
spring clean-up (done on the cheap), backed by emergency measures
which were re-created de noo in time of formidable disease . Attempts
had been made since the early 1800s to promote vaccination, but (as in
other nations) reduction of the threat fostered resistance to coercive
measures, and in 1885 vaccination was brought into play as a hesitation
waltz.'"
Experience of la maladie hideuse ( the hideous disease ) differed in the
three communities. Smallpox mortality among French Canadians in 1885
was double the rate among Irish Catholics, and triple the rate among
Anglo-Protestants. Infants and children under ten accounted for five out
of six deaths, and the disease was still perceived by many French
Canadian parents as an inevitable childhood hazard. Vaccination involved
risk : the degree of protection was uncertain, the procedure provoked
symptoms of the disease, side-effects arose from difficulties in summer
handling of the vaccine, and fears were heightened by deaths in a
makeshift hospital, dependence on arm-to-arm transfer, and by rumours
of syphilitic donors and bovine traits associated with animal origins of
the lymph. We have seen the extent to which French Canadians were
excluded from political channels, and in the summer of 1885 they felt even
more excluded, unheard, and untrusting because of the trial and hanging
of Louis Riel. Under these conditions rumours became explosive,
heightening hostility between the communities,'# and in the solidly French
Canadian Eastern Division, where suffering was greatest, riotous
outbursts were directed against vaccinators, quarantine placards, and
forcible removal of sick children from their homes.
Most Anglo-Protestants, on the other hand, notably the wealthy and
the immigrants, had had their children vaccinated by their own physicians,
consistent with U.S. law and British practice. Irish Catholics had observed
the effectiveness of vaccination in Ireland, and many in even the first
generation (18471867) had submitted to the practice as servants and
nursemaids in Anglo-Protestant households and hotels. The 1885 epidemic
confirmed the conviction among the citys Irish Catholics that vaccination
was worth the risks involved, while among French Canadians it seems to
have intensified the sense of betrayal, repression, and impotence. Sermons
preached on a Day of Thanksgiving at the end of the epidemic suggest,
despite traditional acknowledgement of the punishment of the Almighty,
distinctive changes in attitudes. Pronouncements of Protestant clergy
allow of ambiguous interpretations by listeners : God s judgments are not
merely punitive but remedial ; Punishment came to those who are

126


guilty of neglect ; An epidemic of this kind points out some public sin,
some neglect or disorder in the community.'$ But clergy of all faiths
argued that citizens had the duty to use all the means God had given, all
the works of science, medicine and human intelligence, including both
vaccination and cleanliness, to take in hand both the family environment
and the public environment.
Within the next five years Dr Desroches published his CateT chisme
d hygieZ ne : Quest-ce que l hygie' ne ? R : Lhygie' ne est la science qui
enseigne les moyens de conserver la sante! et d e! viter la maladie .'% In the
same interval Dr Se! verin Lachapelle founded his magazine for mothers,
where he, too, urged resistance : Un petit ange dans le ciel !!! While it
might be a word of consolation at a funeral, in a broken-hearted avowal
of impotence, would we, he queried, make such a pronouncement at the
onset of sickness ? Non, mille fois non. Luttons contre le mal .'&
The new attitude, reinforced by advances in science, was reaching an
ever-larger public. Montreal newspapers were reporting in the late 1890s
the decline of mortality from several other childhood diseases , notably
scarlet fever and diphtheria, in France, Britain, and New York City. Their
banner celebrations of the new century honoured Pasteur, and news items
provided week by week instructive examples of cause-and-effect, routes of
contagion, and successful intervention in localized outbreaks of typhoid
and tuberculosis. La Presse, which claimed 68,000 readers, carried full-
page features headlined Les Progre' s de la Science,'' and Dr Desroches
had sold 30,000 copies of his CateT chisme, re-defining contagious diseases
as those dont une hygie' ne bien comprise peut assure! ment nous
pre! server.'(
Expanding initiative can be seen as part of the personal experience of
modernity.') Within the span of birthdates of our third cohort, scholars
have situated Que! bec literary modernity in four nights of poetry readings
and the theatrical soireT es de famille ; 700 young women a month were
writing to the advice columns of La Presse,'* and the French Canadian
business press was pouring forth a rhetoric of progress and initiative,
reaching several thousand retailers, travelling salesmen, and marchands de
noueauteT s (novelty salesmen).(!

Photographs of the infant cohort of 1900 appear, smiling or pouting,
utterly irresistible, in the earliest baby contest of Le Monde illustreT . We
have seen that one-quarter of them died within 12 months of birth, and
that the rate among French Canadians was 42 per cent higher than among
Irish Catholics or Anglo-Protestants. The lines of cultural cleavage had

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persisted for 40 years, winnowing three cohorts born in the same city. Our
exploration of infant vulnerability, from month to month and year to
year, has shown that poverty is not a satisfactory statistical determinant.
Analyses of seasonality, age structure, and birth intervals point to
systemic properties of cultural practice and to the discriminatory impacts
of residential segregation, ethnic politics, and the political privileges of
property. The French Canadian majority, tightly confined to streets of
high density, was more vulnerable to deficiencies in the public en-
vironment, while the Irish Catholic community, despite limited economic
resources, seems to have achieved some protection for its infants by an
advantageous cultural package and by political and geographic pen-
etration of the turf of the wealthier Anglo-Protestant community.
Despite the persistence of culture-based differentials of mortality,
changes are apparent by 1900, in age at marriage, vaccination, child-
spacing and marital fertility. Newspaper reporting hints at greater
initiative and greater resistance, an instrumental approach to health, and
a whiff of modernity. July 1899 was punctuated by weekly front-page
stories on summer deaths. Over the six months beginning October 1900,
1100 cases of scarlet fever were reported, with 252 deaths, and at the close
of 1900 a count of the years foundlings set their death toll at 97 per cent.("
For the first time, infant mortality was making headlines as a public
scandal, and the recognition that these deaths were preventable would
empower the next generation.

We are grateful for the assistance of the Social Science Research Council of Canada, FCAR-
Que! bec, the Centre interuniversitaire d E! tudes que! be! coises (CIEQ Laval-Trois-Rivie' res),
the Parishes of Notre Dame and Saint Patricks, the Hospital Sisters of Saint-Joseph (Ho# tel-
Dieu), Cimetie' re Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, the Mount Royal Cemetery Company, numerous
archivists, research assistants, and colleagues, in particular, for her help and example,
Danielle Gauvreau of Concordia University.

1 Where in 1880 one-fifth of the sample lived in high-density streets (over 350 households
per kilometre of residential street), in 1900 it reached one-third, including 13 per cent
at densities not observed earlier (5001100 households\km).
2 Matching problems and tests are reported in greater detail in Sherry Olson, Patricia
Thornton, and Quoc Thuy Thach, Dimensions sociales de la mortalite! infantile a'
Montre! al au milieu du XIXe sie' cle , Annales de DeT mographie Historique 1988 (Paris,
1989), 299325 ; Thornton and Olson, Family contexts of fertility and infant survival
in nineteenth-century Montreal , Journal of Family History 16, 4 (1991), 40117 ;
Thornton and Olson, Infant vulnerability in three cultural settings in Montreal 1880 ,
in Alain Bideau et al. eds., Infant and child mortality in the past (Oxford, 1997), 21641.

128


3 Of each set of twins, the second, as shown on the parish register, was excluded from
analyses of next births, and from tables on living conditions of families. Both twins
were included in calculation of death rates, and a dummy variable was introduced into
the categorical analyses.
4 We first combed the census for families with surname B and a child reported under four
years of age. To give adequate representation to the Irish Catholic population, we
added surnames beginning with R for English-speaking Catholics. To find families
where the child had died, we subsequently re-read the census manuscript to check other
married women with surname B and R under 50. Such links cannot always be
confirmed, since the census rarely records maiden names, consequently the census
variables are more often missing for cases of deaths.
5 We combed the records of the cemeteries as well as parish records of burials, and for
Catholic deaths obtained addresses from the original Registres de neT crologie in the
custody of the Parish of Notre Dame.
6 We adapted the method from Jean-Pierre Bardet, Rouen aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sieZ cles : les
mutations d un espace social (Paris, 1983, 2 vols.) The letter B is less sensitive than most
to misspellings, confusion of handwriting, and aural misinterpretation in a bilingual
environment. In a source like the taxroll or directory, unbiased by fertility, it gives
correct weighting to the three principal cultural communities. Although the method
extracts a good sample of the Jewish immigrant population, their infants, as well as
children of Italian and Syrian parentage, are excluded from all analyses, due to
difficulties of census-matching ; in 1901 they amounted in all to 4 per cent of the
population.
7 In cases of mixed marriage we privileged the mothers origins.
8 Because of a general upward shift of rents since 1880 (in near-perfect correlation with
floor area), we modified the thresholds which apply to household rents, street rents, and
occupational medians. Street segments are twinned block-faces. For the cohort of 1900
the low-rent category includes values up to and including $60 per annum, the high-rent
category values of $120 and above. For the 1880 cohort, those threshold values were
both included in the middle-rent category.
9 Data were compiled for 772 street segments (twinned block-faces) in the city and
suburban municipalities (mean size, 85 households), and the segments were aggregated
into 50 districts (mean, 1200 households) by Robert D. Lewis independently of this
project ; he designed the districts to be compact, near-rectangular, and socially
homogeneous. For discussion of the taxroll source and typologies of street segments
and occupations, see David Hanna and Sherry Olson, Social landscape of Montreal
1901 , Plate 30, Historical Atlas of Canada (Toronto, 1990) ; and Sherry Olson,
Occupations and residential spaces in nineteenth-century Montreal , Historical
Methods 22, 3 (1989), 8196.
10 Tests for effects of delayed baptism are reported in Olson, Thornton, and Thach,
Dimensions . In the cohort of 1861, Irish Catholic infants were often baptized at six
or eight days old, French Canadians rarely later than the second day.
11 The first breath is the first sign of life, and a gasp [is] the last.
12 From cemetery records we observed also a trend in the 1870s toward more rigorous
application of the rules for ondoiement.
13 There were in addition 27 stillbirths reported as such ; these are not part of the sample
and do not appear in Table 4, as either births or first-day deaths.
14 Municipal vital statistics become usable about 1900, and distinguish illegitimates,
institutional deaths, stillbirths, and records for the low-mortality Jewish population.
See Annual Report of the Montreal Board of Health (Montreal, 1900).

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15 Mortality of twins was high (46.5 per cent), as in the earlier cohorts, but the rate of
twinning did not vary significantly among the three communities : just under 1 per cent
as observed over the entire five years. Beyond the first day, we find no effects of mothers
age in the French Canadian sample (where numbers are adequate), but evaluation is
uncertain because linkage of cases to the census (source of mothers age) is biased
toward survivors. By examining survival rates among next-born infants, we observed
that the likelihood of first-day death is increased four-fold (to 20.7 per cent) by a first-
day death of the predecessor, but that bias is removed with removal of first-day deaths.
Where a child survives the first day, the next has a normal chance of surviving it (5 per
cent). The effect may be associated with maternal predisposition to premature birth.
16 Comparative studies have repeatedly shown lower mortality among Jewish infants, and
higher among French Canadian and Polish Catholic infants, than can be explained by
the combination of breastfeeding, family income, crowding, water, and sewer
connections. See U.S. Bureau of Children, Report on infant mortality in Baltimore
(Washington, D.C., 1922) and Robert Morse Woodbury, Infant mortality and its causes
(Baltimore, 1926). For more recent cases emphasizing culture and place, see A. M.
Reid, Locality or class ? Spatial and social differentials in infant and child mortality in
England and Wales, 18951911 , in C. A. Corsini and P. P. Viazzo, The decline of infant
and child mortality (The Hague, 1997) ; E. M. Garrett and A. M. Reid, Thinking of
England and taking care : family building strategies and infant mortality in England and
Wales, 18911911 , International Journal of Population Geography 1 (1995), 69102.
17 Spikes of contagion produced differences in the experience of each cohort. If we look
at the (crude) statistics of the City Health Department over runs of eight years, the 1859
cohort was subject to a normal mortality (summers of 1859 and 1860), the cohort of
1879 to somewhat more favourable conditions (summers of 1879 and 1880), and the
cohort of 1900 to a slightly higher mortality than normal, spread over three summers.
We cannot discern any effect of the year-to-year variation on the variation between
groups.
18 First-day deaths show little seasonality, and were largely attributed in the records to
stillbirths, complications of delivery, or prematurity : 79 per cent of French, 89 per cent
of Irish, and half of Protestant. (The last, from Mount Royal Cemetery, are less
informative records.) The proportions are the same if we examine the entire set of
deaths under one year over the period 1 January 1899 to 31 March 1903. Deaths from
contagious diseases of childhood like measles and scarlet fever show a spring
incidence. For a similar treatment of nineteenth-century data see Jan Sundin, Child
mortality and causes of death in a Swedish City, 17501860 , Historical Methods 29, 3
(Summer 1996), 93106, and for comparable U.S. data in the same cohort (18991900)
see Samuel H. Preston and Michael Haines, Fatal years : child mortality in late
nineteenth century America (Princeton, 1991), 4.
19 Deaths formerly reported in those categories, with strong summer concentration, seem
to have been more correctly diagnosed in 1900 as intestinal. On this problem, see
Gretchen Condran and Rose A. Cheney, Mortality trends in Philadelphia : age and
cause-specific death rates, 18701930 , Demography 19, 1 (1982), 97123.
20 After 1885 the causes displayed always account for between 31 and 39 per cent of all
deaths in the City.
21 R. I. Woods, P. A. Watterson, and J. H. Woodward, The causes of rapid infant
mortality decline in England and Wales, 18611921 , Part II, Population Studies 43,
(1989), 11332 ; Robert Woods and Nicola Shelton, An atlas of Victorian mortality
(Liverpool, 1997).

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22 Numbers of births in the cohort of 1900 varied little from month to month, but the age-
selective impact of diarrhoea resulted in large numbers of deaths (days 2364) among
those born March through June. We were not able to discern such an effect in 1880.
23 See the suite of papers J. Bourgeois-Pichat, La mesure de la mortalite! infantile ,
Population 6 (1951), 23348 and 45980 ; John Knodel and Hallie J. Kintner, The
impact of breast-feeding patterns on the biometric analysis of infant mortality ,
Demography 14 (1977), 391409 ; and Jan Sundin, Culture, class and infant mortality
during the Swedish mortality transition, 17501850 , Social Science History 19, 1
(1995), 11745. Invariant with overall level of mortality, this linear transformation is
often used as a check on accuracy and completeness of data on infant mortality.
24 Olson, Thornton, and Thach, Dimensions ; Thornton and Olson Infant vulnerability .
25 Populations chosen as reference groups are males, singletons rather than twins, and
French Canadian mothers. Modifying the order of terms in such models has no effect.
26 Valerie Fildes, Breasts, bottles and babies : a history of infant-feeding (Edinburgh, 1986).
For present-day evidence, see Jean Golding, Paule M. Emmett, and Imogen S. Rogers,
Gastroenteritis, diarrhoea and breastfeeding , Early Human Deelopment 49 (1997),
supplement on Breastfeeding : benefits and hazards, pp. S83S103.
27 For an emphasis on local variance of cultural factors in infant mortality see Preston and
Haines, Fatal years ; Hallie J. Kintner, The impact of breastfeeding patterns on
regional differences in infant mortality in Germany, 1910 , The European Journal of
Population 3, 2 (1987) ; 129 ; Alain Bideau, Bertrand Desjardins, and H. P. Brignoli,
Infant and child mortality in the past (Oxford, 1997) ; Sundin, Culture, class and infant
mortality ; Naomi Williams and Chris Galley, Urbanrural differentials in infant
mortality in Victorian England , Population Studies 49 (1995), 40122 ; with respect to
the fertility transition see Michael R. Haines, Social class differentials during fertility
decline : England and Wales revisited , Population Studies 43 (1989), 30523 ; E. Van de
Walle, Communications (Paris, 1986), numeT ro speT cial : De! natalite! , l ante! riorite! franc: aise
18001914.
28 Marvin McInnis, The demographic transition Plate 29, Historical Atlas of Canada,
vol. III (Toronto, 1990). On the adjustment problem, see Danielle Gauvreau, Peter
Gossage, and Lucie Gingras, Measuring fertility with the 1901 Canadian census : a
critical assessment , Historical Methods (forthcoming).
29 Although maternal death rate per 1000 births appears small, the womans risk of
eventual death in childbirth was multiplied by the frequency of childbearing. Following
modern practice, we include as deaths in childbirth cases of reported weakness ,
tuberculosis, and haemorrhage which occurred within three months of a birth.
30 E.-P. Lachapelle et al., Report of the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis. Province de
Que! bec, 19091910. Our figures for causes of death among adults match their
compilation for 18961906, apparently from the same sources.
31 Due to psychological as well as physiological effects, high infant mortality whips
forward high fertility. This is an issue in the literature reviewed by David Reher in Back
to the basics : mortality and fertility interactions during the demographic transition ,
Continuity and Change 14, 1 (1999), 932. For French Canadians in a smaller city, see
Peter Gossage, Families in transition : industry and population in nineteenth-century
Saint-Hyacinthe (Montreal, 1999).
32 We cannot assume natural fertility, although this measure was designed for such a
situation ; see F. Nault, Bertrand Desjardins, and Jacques Le! gare! , Effects of
reproductive behaviour on infant mortality of French Canadians during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries , Population Studies 44 (1990), 27385.

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33 Paul Huck, Shifts in the seasonality of infant deaths in nine English towns during the
19th century : a case for reduced breast feeding ? Explorations in Economic History 34
(1997), 36886.
34 See Valerie Fildes, Infant feeding practices and infant mortality in England,
19001919 , Continuity and Change 13, 2 (1998), 25180.
35 Se! verin Lachapelle, Femme et nurse, ou Ce que la femme doit apprendre en hygieZ ne et en
meT decine (Montreal, 1901).
36 The full 48-month span of observations yields a similar pattern, but a 33-month cut-off
allowed comparison with data for the 1880 cohort.
37 Mapping of Protestant rates reveals fewer infants on the wealthy flank of Mount Royal
than among the immigrants employed by the Grand Trunk railway shops below the
Lachine Canal. The effect may be associated with presence of more older household
heads and their higher rents. Given the higher proportion of next-borns among Irish
Catholic women, the low ratio in a heavily Irish Catholic district seems to have been
limited by factors other than marital fertility ; we suspect later marriage, diminished
immigration, and lower rates of remarriage.
38 As argued by Barry M. Popkin et al. (Breast-feeding and diarrheal morbidity ,
Pediatrics 86, 6 (December 1990), 87482) ; any substitution for breast milk should be
regarded as part of the weaning process. In their extensive research in the Phillippines,
most breastfed infants were given a wide variety of other foods ; and the mere addition
of water and teas doubled or tripled the likelihood of diarrhoeal episodes ;
supplementation with nutritive foods increased the risk as much as thirteen-fold. See
also Dana Raphael and Flora Davis, Only mothers know : patterns of infant feeding in
traditional cultures (Westport, Conn., 1985) ; Rima D. Apple, Mothers and medicine : a
social history of infant feeding, 18901950 (Madison, Wis. ; 1987).
39 J. Villar and J. Rivera, Nutritional supplementation during two consecutive
pregnancies and the interim lactation period : effect on birth weight , Pediatrics 81, 1
(January 1988), 51. See also Y. Mortarjemi, F. Kaferstein, G. Moy, and F. Quevedo,
Contaminated weaning food : a major risk factor for diarrhea and associated
malnutrition , Bulletin of the World Health Organization 71 (1993), 7992. Traditional
ideologies of hot foods , perspiring mothers in harvest season, or sexual relations
which might spoil the milk are widespread (in Ireland and France as well as African and
Islamic cultures), and may lead to earlier weaning. See Fildes, Breasts, bottles and
babies.
40 Kodjo A. Senah, Infant and child mortality : the socio-cultural dimensions of the
problem in Ghana , in Ezekiel Kalipeni and Philip Thiuri eds., Issues and perspecties
on health care in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa (Lewiston, N. Y. ; 1997), 4990 ; J.
Vanderslice, B. Popkin, and J. Briscoe, Drinking-water quality, sanitation and breast-
feeding : their interactive effects on infant health , Bulletin of the World Health
Organization 72 (1994), 589901.
41 The nursing bottle is the real cause of excess mortality of newborns in summer. The
real remedy, the only remedy, is breastfeeding. Se! verin Lachapelle in La MeZ re et
l Enfant 5 (May 1888), 10.
42 Se! verin Lachapelle, Femme et nurse, 16669 ; in La MeZ re et l Enfant 1 (marsavril
1891) ; and in Le Journal d HygieZ ne populaire, 1 February 1885. Tests in 1899 showed
alarming contamination of the ice supply.
43 See Lachapelle in Le Journal d HygieZ ne populaire, 15 June 1884.
44 Persistence of traditions of infant care is noteworthy. Among Irish Catholic immigrants
to Britain, levels of infant mortality were relatively low despite poverty, and
contemporary British reformers attributed this to higher rates of breastfeeding (see

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Huck, Shifts in seasonality). Differentials in prevalence of breastfeeding in late-

nineteenth-century Montreal among mothers of French, Irish, English, and Jewish
origins are, to a high degree, consistent with what is known for the respective mother-
countries , with behaviour in the same groups in the United States, and with practices
in Montreal at present.
45 Williams and Galley, Urbanrural differentials.
46 A handful of modern studies treat the urban environmental politics which may have
affected infant mortality, notably Susan I. Hautaniemi, Alan C. Swedlund, and Douglas
L. Anderton, Mill town mortality, consequences of industrial growth in two nineteenth-
century New England towns , Social Science History 23 (Spring 1999), 139 ; Sallie A.
Marston, Neighbourhood and politics : Irish ethnicity in nineteenth century Lowell,
Massachusetts , Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78, 3 (1988),
41432 ; Williams and Galley, Urbanrural differentials.
47 Dr Philip P. Carpenter, On the relative value of human life in different parts of
Canada , Canadian Naturalist & Geologist 4 (1859), 17386. See also his On the vital
statistics of Montreal , Canadian Naturalist N.S. 3 (1868), 13456, and On some of the
causes of the excessive mortality of young children in the City of Montreal , Canadian
Naturalist N.S. 4 (1869), 188206.
48 Jason Gilliland and Sherry Olson, Claims on housing space in nineteenth-century
Montreal , Urban History Reiew 26, 2 (1998), 316.
49 In our 12 per cent sample of the taxroll, 9 per cent of householders were property
owners, only 3 per cent to the extent of the $2000 required to stand for the office of
alderman.
50 Paul-Andre! Linteau, Le personnel politique de Montre! al 18801914, E! volution d une
e! lite municipale , Reue d histoire de l AmeT rique francm aise 52, 2 (automne 1998),
189215 ; Christine Simard, Le personnel politique municipal de Montre! al, 18811912 :
espace urbain, richesse et proprie! te! foncie' re (M. A. thesis (History), Universite! du
Que! bec a' Montre! al, 1997).
51 On multiple votes see 2930 Victoria, cap. 56, assented to 15 August 1866, as compiled
in Appendix to the Charter and By-laws of the City of Montreal (Montreal, 1870). The
statute labour tax, a conversion of the 1799 roads coreT e, was overturned in court in
1886 on suit of union members (Montreal Star, 2 and 3 February 1886).
52 Charter adopted by Council in December 1898, sanctioned 10 March 1899, 62 Victoria,
cap. 58.
53 H. B. Ames Papers (McGill University Libraries Special Collections), Council diary of
15 May 1899 ; and 11 October 1899 speech to electors in Saint-Antoine Sud.
54 Montreal, Annual Report of the Treasurer for 1899. For earlier figures see Montreal
Star, 8 January 1886, and Historical and statistical sketch of the schools controlled by the
Catholic School Commission of Montreal (1915), 81. Under the provincial Education
Law of 5 April 1869, property was classed in four panels for school tax purposes :
Catholic, Protestant, a neutral panel for corporations and persons not of either group,
and a set of tax-exempt owners, primarily religious and charitable institutions
(Appendix to the Charter and By-laws of the City of Montreal passed since 1865
(Montreal, 1870). Indicative of the manoeuvres of property was the struggle in 1899
over who would pay for the education of Jewish children, summarized by Michael
Brown in Jew or juif ? Jews, French Canadians, and Anglo-Canadians, 17591914
(Philadelphia, 1986), 23943.
55 We mapped licenses as reported in Montreal Star, 27 January 1899. Irish Catholic
leader M. P. Ryan, Chief Customs Officer in Montreal and former Member of
Parliament, was among those who testified before the Royal Commission on the Liquor

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Trade in Canada (Report, 189395, vol. 2, Evidence, Quebec, 225) ; on licensed and
unlicensed selling, discriminatory law enforcement, and the means by which property
owners excluded licenses from high-rent streets : Beaver Hall, Richmond Square and
Co# te Saint-Antoine (Westmount).
56 Labor Gazette, 1901. It is difficult to evaluate the local effectiveness of street-cleaning
and sanitary investments. The sewer system became somewhat better connected in the
late 1870s but remained very defective in 1900 ; the number of pit privies was reduced
by half in the decade of the 1890s ; in 1899 there were still 3500 stables in the city not
drained or ventilated .
57 Linteau, Le personnel politique . For a sizable negotiation which affected the Irish
neighbourhood of Saint-Gabriel, see Christopher G. Boone, Language politics and
flood control in nineteenth-century Montreal , Enironmental History 1, 3 (July 1996),
7085.
58 Carpenter, On the vital statistics of Montreal , 154.
59 Removal of household offal was improved in 1899, with some incineration and a sewage
farm ; inspection of milk and ice was gradually tightened. Re-engineering the public
environment was expensive, so that governments devised a much cheaper strategy,
aimed at mothers, as shown by Catherine Rollet in The fight against infant mortality
in the past ; an international comparison , in Bideau et al. eds., Infant and child
mortality, 3860. In Montreal such baby clinics, the Gouttes de Lait, were targeted on
French Canadian parishes, as described by Denyse Baillargeon in Fre! quenter les
Gouttes de Lait, l expe! rience des me' res montre! alaises 19101965 , Reue d histoire de
l AmeT rique francm aise 50, 1 (e! te! 1996), 2968. Childrens hospitals were created primarily
through philanthropy, on segregated lines.
60 Reinhard Spree. Health and social class in Imperial Germany : a social history of
mortality, morbidity and inequality (Oxford, 1988). The importance of attitudinal
change in relation to infant mortality has been demonstrated by Sundin, in Culture,
class and infant mortality.
61 For a balanced account of the epidemic see Michael Farley, Peter Keating, and Othmar
Keel, La vaccination a' Montre! al dans la seconde moitie! du 19e sie' cle : pratiques,
obstacles et re! sistances , in Fournier et al. eds., Sciences et meT decine au QueT bec.
Perspecties sociohistoriques (Quebec, 1987), 87127 ; and for the international
backdrop Peter Sko$ ld, The two faces of smallpox, a disease and its presence in 18th and
19th-century Sweden (Umea University Demographic Data Base Report no. 12 (Umea,
1996). See also Annual Reports of the Montreal Board of Health for 1886 and 1887 ; and
Michael Farley, Othmar Keel, and Camille Limoges, Les commencements de
l administration montre! alaise de la sante! publique (18651885) , 85132 in Peter
Keating and Othmar Keel eds., SanteT et socieT teT au QueT bec XIXe-XXe sieZ cle (Montreal,
1995). An 1884 outbreak in Ontario was contained by a contagionist approach,
interpreted as a decisive shift from miasmatic and mixed approaches to public health by
B. L. Craig, in State medicine in transition : battling smallpox in Ontario, 18821885 ,
Ontario History (1983), 334.
62 Edgar Morin, La Rumeur d OrleT ans (Paris, 1969 ; also published as Rumour in OrleT ans,
trans. Peter Green (London, 1971)) interprets a rumour nourished among adolescent
girls and their mothers, a population excluded from the normal channels of political life.
For analogous political psychology, see William Ryan, Blaming the ictim (New York,
1971). Louis Riel was the leader of a Me! tis rebellion in western Canada. French
Canadians identified with this people of mixed Native and French origins and Catholic
faith. Riel had been a student in Montreal in 1860, and the Oblate missionaries to the
Me! tis were, in 1900, still headquartered at Saint-Pierre-Apo# tre, a parish in the east end
of Montreal.
134


63 Montreal Star, 1 February 1886.

64 What is hygiene ? Answer : Hygiene is the science that teaches the means of
conserving health and avoiding sickness. J.-L. Desroches, CateT chisme d hygieZ ne
prieT e (Montreal, 1889), 7 and 9.
65 A little angel in heaven!!! ; No, a thousand times no. Let us struggle against the evil.
La MeZ re et l Enfant, juin 1890.
66 The Progress of Science , Saturday La Presse, 2 February 1901, also 17 January 1899
on flu bacillus ; 20 January 1900, Electrocution of bacillus of tuberculosis ; 9 March
1901 on incubators for premature babies in Paris. Pasteurs serum treatment for
diphtheria was employed in the Citys contagious hospital in 1899 (Commission
d hygie' ne, Rapport Annuel ).
67 Desroches CateT chisme, 61. In the later English edition (1900) he did not refer to infant
diarrhoea among the contagions, or even infections, and no parallel was made with
typhoid even though it spread through some of the same channels. As reported by
Andrew Cliff, Peter Haggett, and Matthew Smallman-Raynor (Deciphering global
epidemics (Cambridge, 1998), 324), typhoid was rarely recognized in infancy and early
childhood ; scarlet fever and tuberculosis were not always recognized, and deaths
attributed to broncho-pneumonia included cases arising as complications of measles
and whooping cough. See Andre! Paradis, Un bilan de l e! volution de l inte! re# t des
me! decins que! be! cois pour les maladies infectieuses dans les pe! riodiques me! dicaux
(18261899) , Reue d histoire de l AmeT rique francm aise 43, 1 (e! te! 1989), 6391, for
parallel expansion of local attention to typhoid, diphtheria, syphilis, and tuberculosis,
and a brusque profusion after 1895.
68 For connections between modernization (a concept present in the demographic
literature) and modernity (left to the literati), see Marshall Berman, All that is solid melts
into air (New York, 1988) ; he sharpens the focus upon the city streets as the theatre of
modern man and a Faustian urge to build and change despite the risks.
69 Franc: ois Ricard, Sur une ide! e de Le! on Ge! rin, ou de la litte! rature comme frivolite! ,
ET tudes francm aises 27, 3 (1992), 7389 ; Micheline Cambron and Franc: ois
He! bert, Pre! sentation , 727, introducing the reprint edition of Les SoireT es du ChaV teau
de Ramezay (Montreal, 1999), originally published in 1900. Best known today from that
group of poets is Emile Nelligan, one of the babies in our second cohort. On the Petite
Correspondence of literary and personal advice, see Re! ginald Hamel. GaeW tane de
Montreuil journaliste queT becoise (18671951) (Montreal, 1976).
70 Fernande Roy, ProgreZ s, harmonie, liberteT , Le libeT ralisme des milieux d affaires
francophones aZ MontreT al au tournant du sieZ cle (Montreal, 1988), 114. She notes a change
of tone in 1900 and a characteristic refus de la passivite! .
71 La Presse, 5 and 17 July 1899, January 1901.

135