Authors: Jeannette de Beauvoir

Asylum (33 page)

BOOK: Asylum

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The institute occupies the mansion formerly known as Ravenscrag, which is, as Martine has noted, a
seriously
creepy-looking building. Look it up online if you don’t believe me: just search the terms
Ravenscrag Allan Institute Montréal
. One can believe that all manner of things went on there, and in fact there are quite a few theories drifting around, many of which verge on the conspiratorial. It doesn’t matter: what is verifiable is quite bad enough.

Project MK-Ultra was the code name for a CIA mind-control research program lasting from the 1950s through the 1970s. It was first brought to wide public attention by the U.S. Congress (the Church Committee) and a presidential commission (the Rockefeller Commission) and also the U.S. Senate. The project attempted to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and generally to explore any other useful possibilities of mind control.

Those “other possibilities” are the stuff of which nightmares are made.

Lansbury Pharmaceuticals is the product of my imagination, but the experiments—at both the Allan and the asylums—with substances that included LSD, chlorpromazine, phenobarbital, and Thioridazine, had to have been carried out with the collusion and cooperation of more than one pharmaceutical company. To this date, none has been identified or investigated. Their roles in this affair have never been explored.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Montréal …

Beginning in the 1940s, under Québec Premier Maurice Duplessis (along with the Roman Catholic Church, which was in charge of running orphanages), and continuing into the 1960s, a scheme was developed to obtain additional federal funding for thousands of children, most of whom had been “orphaned” through forced separation from their unwed mothers.

The federal government offered more monetary support for asylums than it did for orphanages, so this move was primarily financial, although the possibilities for medical experimentation soon overrode the mere fiduciary rewards.

In some cases, children were shipped from orphanages to existing insane asylums. In others, orphanages were merely rechristened as mental healthcare facilities. One writer
1
said that you could go to bed one night in an orphanage and wake up the next morning in an asylum: I found that particularly moving.

Many years later, long after these institutions were closed, the children who survived them and became adults began to speak out about the harsh treatment, medical experimentation, and sexual abuse they’d endured at the hands of the psychiatrists, Roman Catholic priests, nuns, and administrators.

Was there a connection between the work being done at the Allan Institute and the psychiatric experimentation undergone by the Duplessis orphans at the Cité de St.-Jean-de-Dieu asylum? If not proven, it’s certainly plausible. Some authors contend that it happened:

Some of the Orphans interned at St.-Jean-de-Dieu Hospital remember being treated by Ewen Cameron, the psychiatrist who conducted appalling and inhuman experiments on human subjects at Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University as part of the notorious “mind-control” programs of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency from the late 1940s through the early- to mid-1960s.

Bruno Roy, president of the Duplessis Orphans Committee, examined records of hundreds of Orphans, and said that Cameron’s name, indeed, showed up in children’s records.

Cameron was known to use chlorpromazine in his experiments, combining drugs, electric shock, lobotomies and other savage incursions on patients.

His associate Heinz Lehmann, who did undergraduate and postgraduate teaching at McGill and became clinical director at Allan Memorial in 1958, is regarded as the psychiatrist who discovered the use of chlorpromazine on psychiatric patients in 1953.

Yet today, evidence reveals the Duplessis Orphans, railroaded into psychiatric hospitals as retarded and mentally ill, were being administered the powerful drug as early as 1947 with debilitating effects.
2

The sense of many has been that the reparations awarded the remaining orphans is not consistent with those offered to others who have been abused by the system (notably the government reparations offered to indigenous First Nations children forcibly sent to Canadian boarding schools during roughly the same time period); as of this writing, a legal case is being brought
3
to discover why these reparations were so low.

There still remains controversy over the old cemetery at the Cité de St.-Jean-de-Dieu asylum. The asylum buildings themselves now comprise Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine Hospital (and the giraffe and sign about watching out for “our children” are indeed actually on its grounds: you can’t make this stuff up); but the Québec liquor board now owns the site of the asylum’s cemetery.

The paperwork for the purchase from the Sisters of Providence included an unusual provision about the order not being responsible for the “condition of the soil.” Before the liquor board purchase went through, the graves were supposedly exhumed, though very few remains were in fact actually transported. Since then, the site has thrown up some bone fragments that are consistent with human remains. There’s a better than decent chance that there are still nameless forgotten children buried beneath the liquor board’s warehouse.

In any case, the cemetery did not shelter
all
the children who died at the asylum; they’re only the ones whose bodies were not sold to medical schools and who were not identified when the cemetery was relocated.

A partial list of those identified includes the following names. Please take a moment to read them all.

IN MEMORIAM
4

List of minors (under age 21) buried in St.-Jean-de-Dieu Asylum Cemetery, 1933–1958

Date/First Name/Surname/Age

04/26/33 —Anonymous child — (a few hours)

02/17/35 — Anonymous child —

03/29/35 — Marie May Saint-Laurent — 17 years

05/07/35 — Marie-Jeanne Bisson — 14 years

11/23/35 — Pugliesse — 1 day

02/04/36 — Joseph Paul Adélard — 2 days

11/07/36 —Marie Cronier — (while being born)

11/18/36 — Anonymous child — 2 days

01/21/37 — Joseph Monette — 1 day

05/09/37 — Maria Kaziniera Tayer — 1 day

05/26/37 — Marie Germaine Thérèse Isabelle —1 year and 8 months

08/22/37 — Martin Dufour — 8 years

12/05/38 — René Sauriol — 17 years

12/18/38 — André Piché — 7 years

01/06/39 — Gaétan Lapointe — 9 years

02/25/39 — Child of unknown parents — 0 years

04/15/39 — Marie Roséline Léonard — 3 years

07/27/39 — Florence Smith — 19 years

12/26/39 — Joseph Richard Caddington — 1 year and 9 months

08/14/40 — Jean Paul Godmaire — 3 years

12/14/40 — Anonymous male child — 0 years

08/17/41 — Jean-Louis Francoeur — 13 years

10/17/41 — Stillborn child —

12/20/41 — Lucien Couture — 3 years

01/20/42—Dieudonné Parent—15 years

03/07/42 — Stillborn child —

05/30/42 — Thérèse Caron — 15 years

05/31/44 — Anonymous child —

06/01/46 — Pricille Vallières — 20 years

08/11/46 — Thérèse Rancourt — 17 years

05/27/47 — Huguette Latour — 7 years

10/24/47 — Child of Eva Brière and Daniel Forgues — 5 days

11/12/47 — Simone Racette — 18 years

03/28/49 — Jacques Millette — 16 years

04/18/49 — Georgette Fontaine — 6 years

06/03/49 — Yvon Mader — 9 years

07/17/50 — Yvon Aubé — 10 years

02/07/51 — Jean Noël LaLonde — 7 years

07/05/51 — Stillborn male child Bilodeau —

07/09/51 — Antoine LaMarche — 9 years

06/04/52 — Wilfrid Bélair — 13 years

07/07/52 — Female infant Allard — 0 years

03/11/53 — Lise Fitzgerald — 11 years

12/17/53 — Serge Potvin — 9 years

07/15/54 — Léon Jean Fugère —

11/26/54 — Marie Barbeau — 8 hours

04/30/57 — Stillborn male child —

04/24/58 — Royal Fournier —19 years

10/04/58 — Anonymous male child — 4 days

They deserve to not be forgotten.

1
Collusion: The Dark History of the Duplessis Orphans

2
www.freedommag.org/english/press/page07.htm

3
www.montrealgazette.com/health/Quebec+government+asked+disclose+Duplessis+orphan/6619543/story.html

4
Extract from Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Hospital burial registry, Québec Superior Court, 1966–19.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For giving me a wonderful creative home to live in when I’m in Montréal, my thanks to the Leblanc family, owners of the original Théo d’Or.

Much gratitude and love to Lukas Ortiz of the Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency: your name,
mi amor,
is synonymous with perseverance! And many thanks to my fabulous editors at St. Martin’s/Minotaur, Kate Ottaviano and Daniela Rapp, as well as copyeditor Rebecca Maines, who improved this novel by light-years.

As always, thanks to my first readers, Carem Bennett, Marion Hughes, and Dianne Kopser. Carem has been my first reader for more years than I care to remember, and is a steadfast source of support and love. You’re all the best, and give me far more than I deserve.

Finally, thanks to Rod Vienneau, spokesperson and advocate for the remaining Duplessis Orphans and author of
Collusion: The Dark History of the Duplessis Orphans.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JEANNETTE DE BEAUVOIR
is an award-winning author, novelist, and poet whose work has been translated into twelve languages and has appeared in fifteen countries. She explores personal and moral questions through historical fiction, mysteries, and mainstream fiction. Home is an old sea captain’s house on the tip of Cape Cod, although she spends some part of every year in Montreal and in Great Britain. You can sign up for email updates
here
.