I've seen 1000 memes about influenza and the plague because of #COVID_19. While we're all bored, here's a juicy story of class, environment, & protest—my (abridged) @SFUHistory honours thesis on Montreal's 1885 smallpox epidemic. Ask questions and share as you read! (1/30)
So: a sick train conductor arrived in Montreal in Feb 1885. His case was immediately mishandled. The city had no smallpox hospital, so he wasn't properly isolated. Soon, unvaccinated hospital workers brought smallpox into their communities (2/30)
Let's talk about those communities: Montreal was big, urban, and rapidly industrializing. Neighbourhoods and wards were divided along linguistic and class lines, which wasn't cute. Three (90% francophone) East End wards held 81% of the city's population. (3/30)
Let's focus on the French East Enders for a sec. While industrialization changed the city/economy, generated wealth didn't trickle down to these workers. Like in many big 19th century cities, industrialization=population boom=overcrowding=jumps in mortality and morbidity. (4/30) 
Cheaply-built housing worsened living conditions. City architecture changed to welcome duplexes and triplexes, squeezing people in at a steep rent. Many families shared units, or settled for subpar housing. Martin Tétrault has some awful stats about diseases. (5/30)
Here's a good line: “Whether...through an economic, geo-economic, or cultural factors such as religion, ethnic origin, or linguistic identity, one constant emerges: Montreal’s French Canadians paid a death tribute considerably higher than other[s]." (6/30)
The city struggled to address these issues. A doctor satirically published a "Recipe for an Epidemic." Equal parts household garbage, human waste, and still water which “in Montreal, [is] approved by the City Council and is officially authorized by the Health Committee." (7/30)
Social historian Bettina Bradbury (who I cite endlessly) sums it up like this: “Working-class families in mid- to late-19th century Montreal lived in fairly constant contact with disease, poverty, and death.” (8/30)
Okay last theorist, promise. What was happening here was structural inequality (as a byproduct of industrialization) setting up people along class and linguistic lines to be overwhelmingly affected by the epidemic. Rob Nixon calls this slow violence—see definition below. (9/30)
It’s slow, structural, and affects marginalized peoples most. Think of Flint, Michigan, the Bhopal Disaster, or First Nations living with never-ending boiled water advisories and housing insecurity who can't obey, say, COVID-19 measures. (10/30) vice.com/en_ca/article/…
So: Montreal is a place of slow violence. Smallpox shows up. What next? Well, city officials had a slow reaction (which they later admitted in this report), and anglophones and upper/middle-class French Canadians, trusting the city, ran to get vaccinated against smallpox. (11/30)
Lower-class French-Canadians? Overwhelmingly seem uninterested in vaccines... They mostly keep calm and carry on. This infuriates city officials to no ends. People got classist/racist about it, because this was a time and place where French was a race. Sounds familiar? (12/30)
The city starts asking people to quarantine if they/a relative are sick. Many can't because they need to work (this too may sound familiar), or don't have the space. Others just don't want to; they do things like have two-day wedding celebrations in houses with sick kids. (13/30)
Folks tear down signs marking their homes as infected & unsafe. Issued fines are ignored. Compulsive isolation fails. When compulsive hospitalization rolls in, there are show-downs in the streets. Parents swing axes at cops, people hide ill relatives, crowds cheer on... (14/30)
Smallpox continues spreading, so the city pulls out the big guns: compulsive vaccination. Now before we all nod and agree with our 21st century medicine in mind, let's remember that vaccines back then were a rather new and frankly sketchy technology. (15/30)
SO SKETCHY that in April 1885, Montreal's original public vaccination campaign used a tainted vaccine, got some kids sick, and stopped. Even public vaccinators (like Dr Louis Dion here) believed that vaccination needed to be done carefully, only by choice, with consent. (16/30)
French politicians warned that compulsive vaccination wasn't going to go over well. But the Health committee, the press, and businessmen (stressed about Montreal's "tainted city" reputation and how it would affect tourism and exports) pushed for it. Cue the riot. (17/30)
It happened on the day compulsive vaccination began in September. Doctors' homes, health offices, pharmacies selling vaccines, City Hall, and English newspaper officers were targeted. They caused $2,221.21 of damage and mass panic. (18/30)
It's strange that the big text on this epidemic, Michael Bliss's Plague, spends so much time discussion the riot (when really there was only one (1) riot and so much other resistance before) and the protestors’ Frenchness. He even tries tying in Louis Riel's hanging. (19/30)
But what about their class—which is what Donald Firth's MA thesis stresses? And what about environment, which made illnesses (including smallpox) familiar to protestors and had showed them the city's inadequacy and failures? (20/30)
We know protesters cared about their environments. When Montreal tried to stick a new smallpox hospital in the East End, they protested. They expressed disappointment that the city wasn't providing them proper sewers, housing or being mindful about factory pollution. (21/30)
If anything, the reallocation of resources to smallpox measures probably led to worsening conditions. The city's annual sanitary report shows a huge drop in other services when the epidemic peaked. Unpopular, unfamiliar, measures came at the cost of much-needed help. (22/30)
We also know folks had relationships with smallpox as an environmental actor—they'd encountered it before. Officials reported suggested folk recipes for disinfectants. Breaking quarantine may even have been a grassroots way of recreating inoculation (early vaccination). (23/30)
Folks celebrated when the Grey Sisters (traditional/familiar healers) took over the smallpox hospital. Texts such as this one show that people knew of/were given tools to combat smallpox at home, independently, and as families. There were certainly other folk cures, too. (23/30)
Eventually, once employers got involved and refused to pay unvaccinated employees, about 21 000 workers and their families got vaccinated. Firth rightfully calls this “every bit as much an imposition as compulsory vaccination by the city." (24/30)
This isn't to say that workers didn't give themselves fake vaccination scars or split the costs of forged vaccination certificates to avoid this. But the economic pressure was harsh. Between vaccination and the disease's natural course, it was mostly over by Christmas. (25/30)
Except it wasn't really over, for the people most affected. Of 3,164 victims, 2,887 were French Canadians. 37% of losses were in one East End ward, Ste. Marie. Nothing during/after the crisis actually changed the baseline inequalities at play. So slow violence continued. (26/30)
Historical comparisons are always iffy, because contexts change. But I've been asked what I think historical epidemics mean for us, as we #StayTheFHome and work through our fears, anxieties, and feelings about COVID-19. Some thoughts based on my thesis work: (27/30)
#1 Health is environmental. The places we're in, the people we're with, and the ways we relate to/think of pathogens matter in how we interact and combat them. They also change our capacity to deal with them. We need to do OUR best, which may differ from someone else's. (28/30)
#2 Illness is physical AND social. Stop and think about who is most vulnerable in these times, why that is, what kind of help they need, and why. Crises show fissures. Be thankful of how institutions help you, but mindful and critical of who is left behind. (29/30)
#3 We will get through COVID-19 the same way folks got through 1885 smallpox: as a community using the best judgement, tools, and information at our disposal to do what we can for one another. Luckily, we have more options and knowledge today. Hopefully, compassion too.
A big thank you to @SarahCWalshaw for accepting this public history Twitter thread as my final project for HIST424 (like this to get me an A!), to @csmh_schm + @AMSHealthcare for the 2020 Hannah Studentship supporting me this term, and to my lovely cohort. Some sources below!
