Today I had the chance to visit Musée des Hospitalières de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal located on Avenue des Pins Ouest between Avenue du Parc and Rue Saint-Urbain. I’d passed by the complex many times in the past couple of years since I lived right around the corner, but I’d never actually visited the museum.

Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal (Source)

“Hôtel-dieu” means “hostel of God” and is an old term in French for hospitals. The term refers to the origin and history of French hospitals as religious institutions and Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal is no different. It is the oldest hospital in Montreal, founded in 1642 by Jeanne Mance. There is actually a street called Rue Jeanne-Mance and I’d always assumed it bore the name of one of Catholic saints, as many streets in Montreal do. So it was news for me to find out (1) Jeanne Mance was a lady (2) and wasn’t a religious figure.

Jeanne Mance, founder of
Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal
*Click image for full view
(source)

Jeanne Mance was a laywoman born to a bourgeois family in France. When she came to New France, with an endowment from a French benefactress Angélique Bullion, she founded Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal. The hospital was staffed by nuns from the order of Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph (RHSJ) which had been founded six years prior.

Today part of the old hospital has been converted to a museum that sits in two parts. The first floor is the entrance, the second contains artifacts and documents describing the founding of the hospital and the nuns’ convent, and the third displays artifacts from the hospital.

I found the second floor particularly interesting because I had a chance to speak with a guide, a kind old lady who described for me in detail the nuns’ lives from the 1600s onward. It was obvious that the nuns in the convent led solitary and cloistered lives and one might wonder, as I did, what the appeal would be. As my guide recounted, young women were compelled to join the order for many different reasons, but there existed some common narratives in their experiences. Up to mid-19th century, families in New France were encouraged to have large families in order to keep the settlements going strong. Many women who joined the religious orders came from large families where they were the first children, and were expected to be responsible for many younger children. Understandably, after the experience, some young women found life as laywoman unappealing.

Large families also meant that many families were very poor and could not afford an education for the children. For young women, joining the order meant receiving support from a spiritual family and an education. In spirit of sisterhood, nuns would teach each other to write, work with numbers, and skills that would be more difficult for laywomen to acquire. One of the documents in the museum described a 13-year old who had joined the order and had later gone on to become a very successful mother superior. While it might seem unreasonable that a 13-year old could understand or be capable of making such a decision, the chances of a young woman being able to accomplish much outside this context were very small. Also at that time, women were considered to be subjugated to their husbands and devoid of their own identity and person-hood after they married. The nuns, however, were able to retain authority within society and commanded respect for their accomplishments. So while the nuns may have been cloistered from society, in some ways they were much more present and able to contribute to society than laywomen.

Not all nuns were in convents, however, and some orders were actually completely immersed in society. There were orders to help the blind, to help orphans, to help those with leprosy and in general help the needy when no one else was. In Montreal, the convent and the hospital were separate. However, as my guide described the nuns at Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal lived a kind of a double life reflective of their motto “silence and charity”. In the convent they dealt with religious duties, while in the hospital they worked as nurses, tending to the needs of the sick and helping their families cope.

Hôtel-Dieu infirmary (Source)

The medical artifacts on the third floor are quite interesting and make up a large part of the 20,000 artifacts that the museum has preserved. These included instruments such as early microscopes (with intact slides!), glass syringes, wooden wheelchairs, and pictures of the hospital. Aside from the historical medical equiptment, I enjoyed looking at pictures of the nurses, noticing their transformation through the years. Up to 1935 the nurses in Hôtel-Dieu wore head-covering similar to coifs. Apparently, the coif with an extended veil in the back sometimes got in the way so they changed their nuns’ coifs to nursing caps. For most of Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal’s history only nuns were allowed to be nurses in the infirmary; however, after 1901 they began to train laynurses. These young women would train and work at the hospital alongside the nuns and stay with the nuns for a small fee.

In 1970s, following Quebec’s Révolution tranquille (Quiet Revolution), all the hospitals in Quebec were transferred to the government to be run by the secular apparatus. Therefore, while the Hôtel-Dieu hospital exists as a teaching hospital for Université de Montréal, the nurses are no longer associated with any religious orders. What remains of Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal’s 300-year history is the museum and the nuns who live in another part of the complex. Today they run an affordable hostel for families of patients in CHUM/MUHC hospitals who need to stay in the city to accompany their sick family member. The nuns no longer live in a convent, separate from society, and they no longer wear habits but normal clothes. They can only be identified by the pins they wear as part of the order Sisters of St. Joseph (RSJ).

Today the first is the first “real” snow day in Montreal… “fake” snow of course being the kind that disappears after a couple of hours, and “real” being the kind that freezes turning your entire city into an ice rink. I saw this comic back in the summer in the Montreal Mirror and was quite amused because it’s so true. Every single year, that person is me hauling myself up the hill on which half of my classes reside– always muttering obscenities. A couple of years back I heard of a legendary time when city-workers and/or firefighters had actually put ropes across the frozen sidewalks up the aforementioned hills to help people walk up. It made complete sense and every day I asked myself– where are the ropes? But I came to question the veracity of the story after I heard variations like– the firefighters stood on the side and put their feet out so pedestrians could walk up the hill with a good grip– Nay! Nay! Verily they lay their own bodies onto the frozen path so that students could climb and get to class.

The first year I spent in Montreal, gloating in that I’d upgraded my living arrangements from a mere peninsula to an island– one of the most difficult adjustment for me was the weather. Montreal’s summers are much much more warm and humid than Halifax, and the winters that tend to be colder. Halifax has really gorgeous misty days… the best we can (usually) get here in Montreal is a day of smog in the heat of the summer. Although I will admit that we did get two days of fog in early November and I was very excited. On the other hand, we don’t have hurricanes and tropical storms, the really crazy weather here (although I hear Montreal sits on an earthquake zone?). Storms aren’t so bad though. It used to be fun to get a break from school for that period of time, once you got over the mild inconvenience of not having lights or water in your house for a week.

What was most unusual for me was that in Nova Scotia the weather changes from not only day to day, but hour to hour, and I think nature has left its mark on most of us raised in the province in the form of a moody disposition. In contrast, the weather in Montreal tends to be more stable throughout year. There will be a couple of days of sunshine, and a couple of days of rain… you can generally predict if you will need an umbrella. In Halifax trying to subvert the weather is futile and may anger the heavens inducing a tropical storm. Of course, I’ve had friends tell me that Montreal’s weather changes too frequently compared to their hometown. I can’t even imagine.

Despite knowing better, I am going to say (hoping I won’t regret this) that I am excited about the upcoming winter in Montreal. There always so much to do in the island that you frequently forget about the icicles on your eyelashes, and there is nothing more enjoyable than strolling downtown in winter– grabbing a cup of hot chocolate from a coffee shop that is always conveniently five steps away– in search those mythical ropes.

Spring has arrived and the McGill campus looks absolutely stunning…

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

- Albert Camus        

A friend shared this collection in Time a while back, but I stumbled upon them again today. The pictures are by photographer Peter Menzel and are part of the book “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats“.

Bhutan, Shingkhey Village — $5.0
Family recipe: Mushroom, cheese and pork

Before coming to university, I never really thought about food beyond ‘what’s for dinner?’ but since coming here I have to admit my perspective on food has really begun to transform. Aside from learning that I will never make it as a chef, through friends I’ve become exposed to the politics of food, from the meat industry to global food production. I’ve had to research on the Green Revolution and learn in class about agricultural genomics. I’ve gotten to know about the current food crisis, food and women’s rights and even food and homelessness in lectures and conferences.

I am really fascinated by these pictures because they capture a truly colourful cross-section of cultures, juxtaposing some startling differences between what we eat, and how much we [are able to] spend on our food. But I think what is even more striking is the nuanced story that the foods set on the table tell about each family, painting a unifying narrative of the human condition and our basic needs– needs that make us human. It seems as though food ties into every aspect of health, environment, economics and justice in a very subtle yet important way. After all this, it has become a tiny bit harder for me to look at the dinner plate the same way.

*Picture source. The exhibition is on display at Montréal Science Centre until May 3^rd.

“Don’t want to be your exotic…” She declared after the round of applause at her entrance. The music gave way to silence, a few whistles, then in darkness the whole room hushed. “… like some colorful dark fragile bird imprisoned.” she said resolutely. Adorning a red glittery shawl, she let every page fall to floor as she showed us her mother, strength, her Brooklyn, the New Orleans she had seen, the Palestinian that she was, the poet, the daughter, refugee, landless, broken levees, falling bombs, fragility, prisons, youth, loss, men, women, beauty, skin… the nuances of being.

I had the privilege of seeing Suheir Hammad here in Montreal last night. Although I was excited, in retrospective I am not sure what I expected walking up Boulevard Saint-Laurent that afternoon. I had seen her performances on Def Poetry, but seeing people behind the screen, you can never be certain of what is real. When she took the stage, it was almost hard not to feel mesmerized as words —beautiful words, brutal words, few words— fell so effortlessly into their natural habitat, budding from each one a thousand thoughts, and from each of those a thousand emotions.

Brilliant! What a lady. She’s the real deal.

A realization
The path idly abandoned
led home, after all.

*Photograph source (©zeligueWB)

For anyone here in Montreal, this event held on the global day for Darfur looks to be very promising and informative. Hope you can make it!

More info

The past few months have been quite eventful to say the least, and hopefully, once I am able to catch my breath I will be able to post pictures that reflect the daily life and my discoveries while adjusting to life in Montreal.

Every college guide must begin with the obligatory “coming to university is an once-in-a-lifetime learning experience” and other variations. As it has been clearly established by now, college-guides are not meant to be taken seriously other than for one’s viewing pleasure of glossy photo shoots involving abnormally happy people, and permanently-green… deciduous trees. Perhaps I am being a tad harsh on the generic college-guide, there may after all be some truths to those brochures that we all so fondly chuck out.

Learning experiences? Well, the classes and professor have been stellar, not a too radical departure from high-school as everyone would have you believe, but definitely a lot bigger classes, a lot more choices, and a lot more interesting lectures. I have had the opportunity to meet people– literally from all over the world, although there always manages to be a Nova Scotian right around the corner, not to mention the home in a box [aka. gigantic Scotia bank tower presiding on Rue Sherbrooke]. It’s great to be in a campus where there is always something going on and a cause to get involved in [an esperanto-speaking group? Surely you kid *brain explodes* ...]. Yes, Coming here has indeed been a grand change and huge learning experience, moreso than I ever expected, and in ways that I never expected. For instance, it is definitely possible to memorize word-for-word an entire 80 page biology manual, although not before resorting to consuming the sheets in hopes of retaining the information. And, of course, as fun as it maybe to experiment with food, chocolate is a standalone food, it is not meant for experimentation. Just in case you are wondering, yes, I tried… no, it is not a good idea to use chocolate as pasta sauce, nor does it mix well with cheese.

Anyways, I just wanted to share a quote from Carl Sagan that I found tremendously inspiring when I was younger. Pale Blue Dot, displayed below, is the infamous picture of Earth, 4 billion miles out in space, at the edge of the solar system, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, followed by Carl Sagan’s remarks on what this picture represents. I would like to share this because I find what Sagan presents to be both unsettling and moving on a fundamental level. Sometimes I find the existentialist parts of me, parts that desire to set the human definition and experience as encompassing all that is real and all that matters at odds with his perspective. At the same time however, I find myself awed by the profound truth in Sagan’s description of the entirety of humanity’s experiences on this planet.

“Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves….

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’, every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

-Carl Sagan