On February 4, 1882, while the police were looking for stolen corpses, a driver stopped his car at the corner of Sainte-Catherine and Labelle streets, in the Latin Quarter, in front of what is today Place Émilie-Gamelin, a place where the last low houses of this era are on the verge of being razed to make way for the steel, concrete and glass of another luxury housing project.
Young people approach the coachman. They beg him to take them to rue Saint-Justin and wait for them. There, they reappear with two corpses that they load into the car, only to be brought back to rue Saint-Hubert. They want to reward the driver with 50 cents for his trouble, but he demands double. Dissatisfied with his salary, the driver goes to find the police …
Dealers of corpses, nicknamed “resurrectionists”, had young medical students as their clients. For lack of money, they often turned themselves, like their predecessors, into cemetery plunderers.
The stolen corpses were almost always those of left-behind, homeless, condemned now as stiff as the justice system that had executed them. It is not the best protected bodies, those placed in vaults, that is to say those of rich people, who are taken for the purposes of this dark science. By seizing the corpse of a dispossessed rather than that of a notable, one is less exposed to reprisals.
In 1862, another theft of corpses, committed by five McGill University students, aroused commotion after the driver of a sleigh they had convinced to transport these remains also decided to denounce them. The police will search the university, but find nothing there. This will not prevent the families of the stolen corpses from initiating legal action. The principal of McGill University, tested by all this bad publicity, promises that the stolen bodies will no longer be admitted within the confines of his institution. In his view, this is an unusual practice at McGill, but rather frequent in poorer medical circles, in other words among French Canadians. These Catholics, because they are poorer, have no other choice, if they want to practice dissection, than to steal corpses. And for them, for lack of funds, it is not so much a party to go and steal corpses, unlike McGill students, who combine these very macabre nocturnal quests with drinking bouts that occasionally contribute to them. make spotting faster.
The corpse thief doctor constitutes a strong image, from the Middle Ages, of the domination exerted on the weakest. Formerly repressed, this place of the corpse becomes, from the end of the XVIe century, an object of fascination for artists, who are also naturally interested in the structure of bodies. Rembrandt, in 1632, shows Dr. Tulp’s anatomy lesson, the most famous painting devoted to the subject. The body represented by Rembrandt is that of a condemned man. In the Waag Anatomy Theater, the powerful corporation of Amsterdam surgeons presents a public dissection, a great spectacle which attracts, for an entrance fee, the curious of all the beautiful society. Still in XXe century, the painter Matisse, at the time of his training as an artist, had asked the auditor of the school where he was to dissect something in order to better perfect his art.
What would we learn, since these past times of which we are the heirs, by dissecting the social history of medicine, which is in a way the history of hierarchies?
Place Émilie-Gamelin, in the heart of the Latin Quarter, where the scenes of the trafficking of corpses once took place, a Christmas village has just been erected. Fences and surveillance prohibit access to the itinerant, thus pushed back from these places to which they are usually accustomed, as they were, last summer, from the surroundings of the old abandoned coach terminal. . Some view these efforts to “revitalize this downtown park” positively. It is to forget that, since the middle of the XIXe century, this space was first that of the needy, those whose fellows ended up being disemboweled in the name of the greatness of society.
At the Asile de la Providence, where this Christmas village is now located, the sisters of Émilie Tavernier, known as Mother Gamelin, offered help to a large population of the left behind. These convent buildings were destroyed in 1963 to make way for the metro. In a society which today struggles to feed its old people, who are gladly crammed into the solitude of CHSLDs, is this past of social misery completely over? Has it been dissected to learn from it?
We relegate the evidence of poverty behind the iron curtain of our Christmas villages. A 10 billion dollar tunnel bridge between Quebec and Lévis. An amphitheater to house a fabulous hockey team. A golden pension project to accommodate a half-team of ball throwers. A REM to link, regardless of the landscape, a concrete shopping center to another, that of a free zone for internationalized airport trade. Then, of course, it is always possible to be surprised by the food offered to the elders, especially when it recalls the bottom of the bowls of soldiers buried in trenches awaiting death.
“We are all fused together,” writes Charles Darwin, after establishing the animal origin of human beings. The honor of history is to recall this destiny of humanity, in the same way that sociologists recall, through their precious work, that there is everywhere a loneliness to exist all together and that it deserves to be to be observed, according to a principle of sharing the world in equal parts, in a story of the latter which is finally of equal dignity.