Metropolitan Natures: Environmental Histories of Montreal

4. Influenza and the UrbanEnvironment, 1918-1920

68 Influenza and the Urban Environment, 1918-1920 Magda Fahrni 4 The influenza pandemic of 1918–1920, long “forgotten” by historians, has recently captured the imagination of both scholars and the general public, in part because of fears, over the past few years, of a new, twenty-first-century pandemic.1 Montreal, Canada’s early-twentieth-century metropolis, was prey to two waves of the 1918–1920 pandemic. Between September 1918 and January 1919, almost 20,000 Montrealers fell ill with influenza; of these, more than 3,600 died.2 A second, albeit less severe, wave struck Montreal in the winter of 1920: between January and April of that year, 4,336 residents of the city fell ill with influenza and 431 died of the disease and its complications.3 A prime example of what Susan Jones calls the “nonhuman actors [that] have played important roles in ‘making history,’ influencing cultural practices and determining the shape of social institutions,” pandemic influenza had both short-term and long-term effects on the ways in which early-twentiethcentury Montrealers (doctors, nurses, civil servants, and ordinary citizens) experienced , perceived, and planned the urban environment.4 This study of Montreal’s experience of the influenza pandemic of 1918– 1920 is rooted in the social history of health and in the history of urban space. The waves of pandemic influenza that struck Montreal in the fall of 1918 and then again in the winter of 1920 contributed to a heightened consciousness of the urban environment on the part of the city’s inhabitants. The “urban envi- Influenza and the Urban Environment - 69 ronment” is understood here to mean an ensemble of elements ranging from weather, climate, and air quality to the odors produced both by manufacturing and by crowds of people in close proximity and to the relative density and overcrowding of both homes and neighborhoods. In attempting to understand the ways in which Montrealers who lived through the influenza epidemic perceived the urban environment, this essay engages with what Samuel Hays has characterized as one of the principal questions of urban environmental history, namely, tracing “changes in the way people observed, thought about, and conceived the environment around them.”5 This interrogation is particularly relevant in the context of the 1918– 1920 pandemic, which, as one historian notes, “was no triumph for modern science and medicine.”6 In the absence of a surefire method of prevention or proven cure for influenza, in a context where the virus (or bacillus, as it was generally referred to in 1918), appeared victorious, state personnel, health professionals , and social reformers all placed their faith in an improved urban environment. They did so for various reasons: some drew on older miasmatic explanations of disease transmission, others on the more recent germ theory of disease. Both sets of explanations, however, advocated acting upon the local environment in order to prevent the spread of communicable disease. The 1918 and 1920 epidemics heightened many Montrealers’ awareness of the urban environment. Bourgeois citizens undertaking emergency volunteer work during the epidemic, in particular, were confronted—for the first time, in many cases—with the existence of the city’s slums and back alleys. During this medical catastrophe, they expressed dismay at Montreal’s odors, dirt, and insalubrities—at what one citizen, for instance, called “the dirty and disgusting state of our streets.” Relatively new fears of germs and microbes coexisted with, and reinforced, older criticisms of dirt and filth. The influenza epidemics spurred the city’s public health authorities and social reformers to action, obliging them to rethink the urban environment; medical and municipal authorities, along with reform-minded citizens, proposed “ways to purify our good city of Montreal.”7 To be sure, this awareness of the importance of the urban environment had already been nourished by the public health campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including those campaigns fueled by concerns raised in the context of the Great War. Yet as Christopher Boone points out, “planning for natural disasters typically occurs during and immediately after crises.”8 Montreal journalist Éva Circé-Côté made essentially the same observation during the influenza epidemic, noting rather cynically that, “when epidemics strike, there is an awakening of the philanthropic spirit. For a few weeks, we speak of preventative measures to protect the masses against contagion, but when the danger has passed, the au- 70 - Magda Fahrni thorities fall back to sleep...