The Doctor and the Madmen

by Louisa Blair

One fine day in late winter, 1826, a young doctor and his wife arrived in Quebec City in a horse drawn sleigh, galloped around the city a few times, like the look of it, and decided to stay for the rest of their lives.

Dr. James Douglas was fleeing from the United States. His crime? Vandalizing fresh graves, digging up the corpses, and taking them home to dissect them. He was twenty-six years old.

At the time of his crime, Douglas was teaching surgery and anatomy at Auburn Medical College, in New York. To pass their surgical exams, his students had to do dissections, but, in a Catch-22, the law made it impossible to obtain enough corpses. It was the second time Douglas had been caught. The first time he'd dug up the body of a black slave owned by a judge, who let him off with a warning. This time Douglas made a dreadful mistake: thinking he was digging up a poor beggar, he instead robbed the grave of an eminent citizen. When someone recognized the dead man left carelessly in his office, Douglas and his wife didn't linger. They fled by sleigh that very night for Canada.

Soon after he arrived in Quebec, Douglas established a reputation as one of the most skilled physicians in Lower Canada. A pioneer of nineteenth-century medicine, he was an innovator in public health, vaccination, and medical education and regulation. But it was in the care for the mentally ill that he made his reputation. He opened Lower Canada's first asylum, and under his watch, for a brief period of time in the mid-nineteenth century, the reatment of the mentally ill was perhaps as humane, creative, dignified, personal, and healthy as it's ever been before or since.

When Douglas left Quebec forty years later, in an act of historical symmetry, he took two corpses with him: this time they were mummies, pilfered from Egyptian graves during his holidays abroad.

James Douglas grew up in Scotland, the son of a Methodist minister, and began his medical studies at age thirteen. By eighteen he had signed on as surgeon on a Norwegian whaler, and spent the year patching up fishermen ripped apart in pursuit of whales in Hudson Bay. He returned to finish his studies, and took off for India. A year later he found himself in Honduras among the Mosquito Indians, helping to found a disastrous new colony. The malaria, the fevers, the hostility of the natives, and the starvation were too much even for Douglas, and he fell angerously ill. Half-conscious, he was thrust on a schooner bound for Boston. On his recovery, planning to return to Scotland via Montreal, he was forced by a landslide to stop in Utica, New York. There, word got around that he was a surgeon. One day he was asked by a farmer to look at a vicious-looking pitchfork wound. Douglas fixed him up. In gratitude the farmer gave him fifty dollars and a horse. Douglas needed no more encouragement: he stayed, married, and began a teaching practice.

Previous page: Scottish-born and educated, James Douglas spent most of his medical career in Quebec City after he was forced to flee the United States for illegally conducting dissection experiments.Though he specialized in correcting strabismus and clubfoot, he established a reputation for leadership and management during the 1832 cholera epidemic. Under his direction, the new 300-bed Marine and Emigrant Hospital became renowned as a training school. In 1845, asked to take responsibility for the insane in Quebec, he established the Beauport Asylum, negotiating a monopoly over their institutional care. Douglas's vision of care prevailed for the next twenty years. In 1865, soon after the deaths of his colleagues and disheartened by what he perceived as government interference, Douglas liquidated his share in the institution. In his latter years, having lost most of his money in bad investments, he lived with his son James in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. He died in New York City in 1886, and is buried at Sillery, Quebec.   Joseph Painchaud was a Quebec doctor and surgeon who befriended James Douglas when the latter took up Canadian residence. After the Marine and Emigrant Hospital opened in 1834, he was taken on by Douglas and worked there until his death in 1871

Soon after arriving in Quebec he started a.little school of surgery and anatomy in the basement of his house. Four years later his wife died; he remarried shortly afterwards. No one has recorded what either wife thought of the corpses being dissected in the basement, but when his friend Joseph Painchaud offered him dissecting quarters in his house, on condition that he and his son could attend the lessons, Douglas agreed. Another young student of Douglas's, Edward Dagge Worthington, described having to prepare dissections for the following day's lecture in this "dismal and foul-smelling" basement room, around which "men's, women's and children's heads galore-were ranged on shelves." His only company was "several partiallydissected subjects and numerous rats which kept up a lively racket coursing over and below the floor and within the walls." In Quebec at the time, some two hundred deranged people were being kept in prison basements or isolated lodges in general hospitals. Some of them were chained to the floor for years. Within a year of arriving in Quebec, Douglas had become one of its most notable medical educators. When Asiatic cholera reached Europe, he predicted that it would soon cross the Atlantic. Based,on his experience in Honduras, he advised his medical colleagues to prepare for the worst. When the infectious disease finally arrived in Quebec in 1832, it killed one-eighth of the population, many within hours of contracting it. During this period, Quebec was receiving hundreds of shiploads of immigrants, many from countries where cholera was rife. Many people died at sea. The rest were received at the new quarantine station at Grosse-Be, but the numbers grew so overwhelming, ships sailed on to Quebec City unchecked. To care for the sick, tents were erected on the Plains of Abraham. Douglas and the handful of qualified doctors in town did their best, but didn't know how to stop the disease. It felt like wartime. The noise of cannons roared through the city, as cannon fire was thought to clean the air, and the smell of burning tar assaulted the nostrils, as people hoped that by spreading tar in the streets and setting light to it they could burn up the disease. Mean while, the rich, including Douglas, sent their families to the cpuntry, and often ended up spreading the disease further afield.

Douglas worked so hard during this and two subsequent epidemics that his health never fully recovered. Twice a week, however, he would leave this nightmare of desolation and go trout fishing in the Montmorency River, without which, he claimed, he would never have survived. The only good night's sleep he ever had was on a pile of cedar boughs during a moosehunting expedition. The fruit of one of these expeditions, a gigantic stuffed moose, stood at the foot of the staircase of Douglas's house, and proved a star attraction for many of Quebec's most famous visitors, including Charles Dickens.

By now his reputation was thoroughly established, and in 1837 Douglas, along with two colleagues, established Quebec's College of Physicians and Surgeons, the first successful attempt to regulate the profession in the country. That same year he was appointed director of the new Marine and Emigrant Hospital, built to handle the sailors and immigrants from the 1,200 ships that arrived in Quebec every year.

There was plenty of opportunity for surgical practice at the new hospital, as sailors were still hoisting and stowing cargo by hand, and frequently had terrible accidents. Under his leadership the Marine and Emigrant Hospital became the best school for surgery in the continent, and students fought to study under Douglas.

Next Page