Saint-Henri 1961: House Calls
Visits to a vanished world
On rainy days when I was growing up, we sometimes went snooping in trunks and cedar closets, hunting for anything to combat boredom: old magazines, clothes to dress up in, photo albums, souvenirs of foreign places. We found artifacts of a long ago glamorous time in my parents’ lives before they had children. I think most kids did this. There were fewer ways to be entertained then, and children were a bit more curious about adults than they are now.
One particularly fascinating object lived on the top shelf of an upstairs closet—my father’s old doctor bag. He was psychiatrist, and later a Freudian analyst, and no longer had any practical use for it except as a keepsake from his days as a young doctor. We sometimes took it down from the shelf.
It was a classic double-handled Gladstone medical case covered in pebbled black leather. Inside were occult objects— medical instruments that we were told not to play with but loved handling and imagining being used on people. There were the scientific gadgets I could never get to work —a stethoscope, an otoscope. There were also toy-like items which I could work: a plexor to test reflexes, and a tuning fork to test hearing. Doctors still use most of these instruments, although I am sure that within my lifetime people will find them in junk shops and wonder what they were for.
Dad held onto the doctor bag amid countless declutterings and house moves, and through its slow physical disintegration and ultimate falling apart, alongside that of its owner. Some of the instruments have survived. My father was very proud of being a doctor. The bag was a reminder of the hands-on care he did at one time in his life.
In 1959 Dad began his residency in psychiatry at the Montreal General. As a resident he made money moonlighting as a family doctor in Saint-Henri, a scruffy, predominantly French-speaking district on the other side of the train tracks which had once been the manufacturing heart of the city but was by this time well advanced in its long, slow decline.
My father covered for another doctor who had a family medical practice in Saint-Henri. The job consisted of making house calls for urgent cases outside office hours and he was paid by the visit. This was at least a decade before universal free health care in Canada. I don’t believe Dad did this work out of charity. It was a way to supplement his income while completing his education. Still, I often wonder how often he wasn’t paid, or did not accept payment. House calls cost more, and people in Saint-Henri couldn’t pay much. There must have been easier ways to make a living, so perhaps there was a charitable impulse in this after all.
Around this time he bought his first car, a black Dodge Dart, which he drove through the cracked and pot-holed streets of Saint-Henri to his appointments. Cars were a luxurious novelty for my family and “going for a drive” anywhere was still a treat. My father often had company on his rounds: either his younger sister, Mary, still in high school, or my mother, his fiancée. They waited for him in the car on these ride-alongs. There was nothing dangerous or suspect about a young woman sitting alone in a parked car on a dark street in a poor neighborhood back then.
In my mother’s memory, they were always driving through St. Henri in the winter dark. She remembered Dad forever jogging up the curling staircase of a shabby triplex, black doctor bag in hand. “He would park and dash up the stairs into a house and I would straighten out the car while I waited.” My mother prepared for her future domestic duties by cleaning out its interior. “Your father lived in the back seat of his car,” she said. “Piles of papers. Changes of clothes. Coffee cups.” She spent much of their marriage keeping him organized. Her only complaint about their life together was how much time she spent waiting for him while he worked.
I think my father covered for this doctor in Saint-Henri because he spoke French. But not all the patients he saw were French. Saint-Henri abutted Little Burgundy, a predominantly Black neighborhood that was home to employees of the Canadian National Railway. In most cases, however, he got calls from French homes, and the most common complaint was une crise de foie.
In French une crise de foie is what used to be called a bilious attack, or more generally, any kind of digestive problem. According to my father, une crise de foie in Saint-Henri was a universal label for many kinds of distress. Maybe there was a need for an all-purpose descriptor because in a moment of panic it was not always possible for families to put into words why they urgently needed a doctor, especially when the underlying crise could have been malnutrition, alcoholism, mental illness, or domestic violence, and, ultimately, poverty. There wasn’t much he carried in his doctor bag that could help such cases.
I’d often wished my father had told us more about the people he’d met and the neighborhood he’d gotten to know. I now read in his silence that there wasn’t a lot he could do for them. Saint-Henri was a regular neighborhood of working people, but, by the sixties, life for a lot of its residents was hard and getting harder. Factories in the neighborhood had been closing since the end of WWII, and Saint-Henri was emptying out. Just a few short years after Dad made house calls, many of the nineteenth century homes and workshops in Saint-Henri would be demolished, along with much of Little Burgundy and Griffintown, in the name of urban renewal and, sadly, to build an expressway.
Saint-Henri today has been gentrified. Bounded by the gourmet Atwater Market and the waterfront bike paths along the Lachine Canal, it has become a “cool” neighborhood. I am old enough to remember the rundown Saint-Henri that we drove through without stopping. The old factory buildings of Saint-Henri have been repurposed and surviving housing renovated. Its streets are filled with people from all over the world. There is little trace of earlier generations of inhabitants who called my father and waited anxiously for him at their windows.
There has been a lot written about the demolitions of the 1960s, the erasure of historic neighborhoods, and the expropriation of its residents, particularly that of Little Burgundy, which was Montreal’s oldest Black community. The images here come from the archives of the city of Montreal, which tracked its destruction of Saint-Henri and Little Burgundy in hundreds of photographs of exteriors and interiors of buildings, only some of them derelict, about to meet the wrecking ball—stairwells, porches, alleyways, kitchens and bathrooms, in gritty black and white reminiscent of a police procedural. Knowing what happened to this neighborhood, they are in fact crime scenes. A school classroom filled with chairs pushed away from their desks, as if the students had just run out to recess. Laundry is still flapping on lines on back porches. Luncheonette counters have customers still lingering over their coffee.
Over the decades Montreal has engaged in a lot of unthinking destruction of the architecture in its historic neighborhoods, but its greatest losses have been the communities of people that scattered. My parents are both gone now and the Montreal of their youth has also disappeared.
Cities endlessly reinvent themselves, and in many ways life in Montreal has much improved. There is now more equitable access to medical care. But there are never enough family doctors. And none of them make house calls.
Notes:
The archive photos are freely available online and worth viewing by anyone interested in urban history, Canadian history, or street photography. Links below:
Mysterious Photographs of the Man from the Ministry Who Demolished Montreal
Archives de Montreal.com/les quartiers disparus 1965-1967/
I highly recommend this short, beautiful documentary about Saint-Henri shot around the time my father was practicing medicine there.
Although I did not live in Saint-Henri. the now-alien world of this film, with its diners and movie theaters, handpainted signs and free range kids, is familiar to me. This is not surprising, since was far closer in time to my own youth than that youth is to today. The Saint-Henri in every city is long gone, part of the world we have lost.
I agree; fascinating! It seems Montreal went from 19th century shtetl to streamlined city in a matter of years. It’s always sad when physical and community history are stomped out in the name of progress. I love the old photos!
Fascinating! Quick story to give you hope that kids are still curious about their ancestors: About a decade ago, a friend and her granddaughter are with me visiting a mutual adult friend. We expect the teenage granddaughter to be bored with our talk, so we invite her to take the family dog and go for a walk on the beach. "Oh, no," she says, "I'm staying here. I'm learning more about my father than he's ever told me."