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|  What would it have been like to live in Marie-Claire's time and place? How was the world different in 1885? How did people get around? Why was there so much disease during this period in Montreal's history? At Home 
Imagine there's no toilet in your house. Instead, you have to share an outhouse with all your neighbours. There are no sewers linking the outhouse to a filtration plant, and sometimes the cesspool beneath the outhouse overflows into the street. This was the Montreal that Marie-Claire knew: a city where hardly anyone had indoor toilets, or access to clean drinking water. It was a city where many people died of diseases that they caught because of bacteria in the water they drank, or germs that spread easily because people lived crowded together in small houses or apartments. By 1885 most houses did have access to piped-in water, although if you wanted hot water there was no "hot" tap -- you had to heat it on the stove. The water that came through the tap hadn't been filtered or treated in any way. Some days it was fine to drink; on other days, especially in the spring and fall, it was actually dangerous to drink water out of the tap. GO BACK TO THE TOP Getting Around In 1885 there were no cars. Most people walked from place to place or, if they had a bit more money, took a horse-drawn trolley. Instead of cars, there were horses -- at least three thousand stables in Montreal alone at the turn of the century. And where there were horses, there was horse manure, and lots of it. To add to the problem of manure, hardly any of the streets in Montreal were paved in 1885, which meant that in dry weather they were very dusty, and in wet weather they were extremely muddy. They were also clogged with garbage, as there were no garbage trucks in those days to take away your household trash! GO BACK TO THE TOP  Making a LivingThe average family lived on eleven dollars per week, although many families had to make do on as little as five dollars per week. Many women worked outside the home, although they were paid much less than men. A woman such as Marie-Claire's mother was paid very little for the shirts she sewed -- perhaps a few dollars for a dozen shirts. GO BACK TO THE TOP Smallpox One of the most feared diseases in the 1800s was smallpox. The vaccine for it had been invented in 1796 by an English doctor named Edward Jenner. He noticed that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox (a disease similar to smallpox that infected cows) never contracted smallpox themselves. With this knowledge he was able to create a vaccine that would protect anyone from catching smallpox. It's true that, as Marie-Claire's aunt says, patients often got sick after being vaccinated, but they soon recovered. And almost anything was better than contracting smallpox: people often died from the disease and, among those who lived, many were left with terrible scars or became blind. Although Dr. Jenner had invented the vaccine in 1796, and the vaccine was available in Canada as early as 1800, it was still not in widespread use at the end of the 1800s -- which is why so many people fell ill in the smallpox epidemic in Montreal in 1885. Aboriginal people caught the disease very easily, and many thousands of them died in epidemics in the 1800s. GO BACK TO THE TOP Holidays The holiday of Fête-Dieu, which Marie-Claire celebrates with her family, is also known as the Feast of Corpus Christi. This is a religious holiday celebrated each year, usually in June, by Roman Catholics. Corpus Christi is Latin for "body of Christ," and it is Jesus's body, in the form of bread that is eaten at Holy Communion, which Roman Catholics honour and celebrate at the Feast of Corpus Christi. GO BACK TO THE TOP |
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