182 Value of Human Life in Canada. 



To the work of palliating or curing diseases, 25 physicians or 

 other medical men honourably devote their lives, and are thank- 

 fully supported by the inhabitants, along with 15 vendors of drugs • 

 in all, an apparatus of 40 persons devoting their energies to res- 

 toration, besides large numbers of Hospital attendants. Sisters of 

 Charity, and other nurses employed in tending the sick. But to 

 this day the city of Montreal does not employ a single officer of 

 health to detect the causes of preventable disease, nor does she 

 make it a requirement in the men she elects to her Municipal 

 Council, that they should enforce those sanitary regulations which 

 the law empowers them to carry out. 



The limits and scope of this paper do not allow me to point out 

 the special causes of this extreme mortality, nor the means required 

 for their removal. It may be sufficient to place on record an ac- 

 count of a court in the Petite Rue St. Antoine, which I visited in 

 April last in company with a Domestic Missionary. It was by no 

 means so bad as many parts of the Griffintown suburbs. It is to 

 be hoped that the time will soon come when this description will 

 be as great an antiquarian curiosity as the " plague-stone" in the 

 Warrington Museum, in a hollow of which the money was passed 

 through vinegar to prevent transmission of infection. 



We left the street through a covered passage, treading on bricks 

 and pieces of wood through a mass of wet and decomposing manure 

 and filth. Reaching thus the small back-yard, we found it to con- 

 sist apparently of a widely-extended midden, consisting of disgusting 

 slutch and every kind of refuse, from a few inches to some feet in 

 thickness. On two sides, this yard was separated from two simi- 

 lar ones by partition fences ; on the other two it was enclosed by 

 dwellings. The inner house, or rather hovel, was divided into two ; 

 the two little rooms upstairs, inhabited by a French family at a 

 rent of $4 a month ; those below by two families, paying $3.50 

 for the liberty of being poisoned. The miserable rooms not only 

 got no air but what was charged with the stenches of the yard, 

 but just outside were several privies, too disgustingly filthy to be 

 used, but breeding " nast" to soak through the wooden walls and 

 floor of the inner room. This was filled by a family, where of 

 course there was sickness ; with closed door and window, so that 

 no air entered but what was saturated with fever-stenches. For 

 the upper rooms of the cottage opposite, $8 a month were paid. 

 On descending the stairs to reach the street, we had to cro s over 

 fluid matter, stepping on bricks. The lower story, for which 



