Montreal is blessed in its charities and philanthropies. Those for the sick have an interesting history, which may be told best in chronological order:
THE HOTEL DIEU
The early history of the first hospital in Montreal has been told in the first volume. To recapitulate its history to the beginning of the English régime. It started on the first day of the foundation of Montreal, May 17, 1642, when Jeanne Mance arrived with the express purpose of founding a hospital, being helped thereto by funds provided by Madame de Bullion. Her first home adjoined to the château, shortly built in the fort inclosure, and that little home, the Hôtel Dieu, built of logs, in 1644, at what is the North East corner of St. Paul Street, became the first of the infirmaries directed by her alone for seventeen years. The Hôtel Dieu was not, however, completely founded until the arrival, in October, 1659, of the three Hospitalier Sisters of St. Joseph from La Flèche in Anjou, sent to her by M. Jerome de la Dauversière. These were Judith Moreau de Brésoles, Catherine Macé and Marie Maillet. This body had been established by de la Dauversière and Mlle. de la Ferré in 1642 for Montreal, and now when the hour had arrived its representatives were received in the first Hôtel Dieu, the wooden building twenty-five feet square, which lasted fifty years on St. Paul Street. In 1666 Louis XIV confirmed the establishment of the Hôtel Dieu by letters patent. In 1695 the Hôtel Dieu was razed to the ground by fire and the remains of Jeanne Mance consumed, but the hospital was rebuilt on the same site. Fires again in 1721 and 1734 attacked it. Still it rose from its ruins. In 1760, owing to the scarcity of barracks, Amherst’s troops took possession of the west chapel, which had been commenced in 1656 and had served till 1678 as the only place of worship for citizens and sick alike. It was dismantled and turned into a stable. Years afterward the sister procureur of the Hôtel Dieu, came across the account of the bill for the unpaid damages and sent it to Queen Victoria who promptly sent a check for the amount due. In 1852 the Hôtel Dieu established, in the college built originally by the Baptists and bought for $16,020.00, the branch hospital of St. Patrick’s on Guy Street, for the principal purpose of providing the Irish and English Catholic population with English-speaking physicians and sisters.
The first physicians were Doctor David, Doctor Howard and Dr. (Sir William) W.H. Hingston. The work was discontinued about 1860, when preparations were being made to open the present Hôtel Dieu on Pine Avenue, and the building was opened on September 8, 1860, by the Congregation Nuns as a convent school under the name of the “Pensionnat du Mont St. Marie.”
On account of the disasters from fires the statistics of the Hôtel Dieu for the first century of its work are incomplete, but from 1760 to 1860 the exact number of cases of invalids admitted is 82,121. By 1909, when the 250th anniversary of the arrival of the three Hospitaliers was celebrated, the number had mounted to 119,352. In 1861 the Hôtel Dieu made its first great change, when it was transported from the corner of St. Paul and St. Sulpice Street to its present location, Mont St. Famille on Pine Avenue. When it is remembered that the nuns are an inclosed order and never leave their cloister or their grounds, to leave the old Hôtel Dieu on St. Paul Street was like tearing themselves from their home to journey to a far-off land. Their consolation was to take with them the remains of their sisters, buried there during the preceding 200 years. The stones of the old chapel on St. Joseph (afterwards St. Sulpice Street) and St. Paul Street, were taken to erect a little chapel dedicated to St. Joseph in the new convent grounds. Since 1845 eight independent off-shoots of the Hôtel Dieu have risen to carry on the work started in 1659, viz., at Kingston, Tracadie, Chatham, Madawaska, Campbellton, Arthabaska, Windsor and Winooski. From the house of Kingston the Hôtel Dieus of Cornwall and Chicago have sprung.
Since the transition from St. Paul Street the Hôtel Dieu has become more and more of the nature of a public hospital, fully equipped and of the modern type. From 1857 to 1874 the Hospital provided a home for old people of both sexes to the number of thirty-seven to forty a year. This was then left to other religious bodies established for the purpose.
ANCIENT HOTEL-DIEU UP TO 1821 (ST. PAUL ST.)
HOTEL-DIEU IN 1861