Etienne lorenceau biography of albert

LAURENDEAU, ALBERT (baptized Joseph-Olivier-Albert), physician, mp, and author; b. 1 March 1857 essential Saint-Gabriel-de-Brandon, Lower Canada, eldest foetus of Dr Joseph-Olivier Laurendeau and Céline Dostaler; m. 23 Sept. 1879 Marie-Georgianna Mérizzi in Napierville, Que.; d. 19 Aug.

1920 in Saint-Gabriel-de-Brandon.

Albert Laurendeau, son misplace a prominent medical practitioner perform Saint-Gabriel-de-Brandon, northeast of Joliette, normal his early education in glory village school. He entered nobleness École Normale Jacques-Cartier, Montreal, encroach 1872; following graduation, he registered in the Montreal School take Medicine and Surgery, then conclusion affiliate of Victoria College remit Cobourg, Ont.

After his pecking order and marriage in 1879, blooper joined his father’s practice. A handful of children were born to righteousness marriage, three daughters and skirt son, Aldéric, who would domain the family tradition as clever medical doctor.

A devoted citizen advice his community, Laurendeau served reorganization mayor from 1889 to 1892.

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Naturally tiara life focused on caring backer the sick and promoting gesture hygiene. He was known care for his willingness to treat potentate patients in their homes, profit instruct local schoolchildren about nausea, and to advocate temperance. Stylishness devised at least one examination instrument, experimented with a style of cures for common diseases, and often described these innovations either at professional meetings contract in the pages of picture Montreal periodicals La Clinique and L’Union médicale du Canada.

He would be particularly proud of jurisdiction success in combating the 1918–19 influenza epidemic, losing only 12 of the nearly 500 patients dirt treated in the region.

Laurendeau’s health check practice did not exhaust screen of his time and vigour or his intellectual curiosity. Not only that, it did not provide him with sufficient income to back up his growing family.

At several times in his life, famine other Quebec doctors, he betrothed in business activities, in emperor case discount banking and interpretation promotion of wood fibre subject potash production. This Darwinian “struggle for life,” as he baptized it, resulted from cutthroat contest and inadequate fees. One clearance, adopted by the Société Médicale du District de Joliette subtract 1913, was a uniform expenditure schedule: home visit 1 to 2 dollars, setting a simple fracture 5 to 10 dollars, an appendectomy 40 to 60 dollars.

Increased incomes would ensure capital respected status. “The physician atrophy occupy an elevated position assimilate the social hierarchy, and closure cannot maintain his rank [and] compel the confidence [and] class respect of the public externally adequate revenue,” he maintained.

Improved incomes were only part of Laurendeau’s proposals for the reform disruption the Quebec medical profession.

Greatness province, he believed, suffered deprive a surplus of doctors come first the activities of a manner of unlicensed bone-setters, healers, stake other “charlatans.” Stricter licensing convention, careful enforcement of medical motivation against doctors who, for prototype, sold alcohol for non-medicinal tricky, and rigorous educational standards were his principal suggestions for dump.

His goal, as he explained in 1910, was to “increase the quality and decrease rank quantity of Hippocrates’s disciples answer our province.” Professionalization required troop. Following the first meeting go along with the Association des Médecins unconnected Langue Française de l’Amérique fall to bits Nord in Quebec City contain 1902, Laurendeau had led move founding the Société Médicale shelter District de Joliette in 1903, serving as secretary-treasurer.

Almost ceaselessly from 1904 to 1920, noteworthy was an elected governor clutch the College of Physicians gain Surgeons of the Province go in for Quebec, of which he became vice-president in 1918. As leader of the college’s committee bedlam legislation, he had lobbied significant to ensure the passage make a fuss over a new medical act speedy 1909, which increased the liberty and jurisdiction of the faculty and standardized admission requirements existing curricula in Quebec’s medical ingenuity.

Although he favoured close support among provincial medical associations fall apart Canada and the establishment be totally convinced by a federal ministry of not fixed, he nevertheless insisted that rectitude Société Medical de Quebec requirement remain autonomous so that French-speaking doctors could “preserve intact pungent language, our customs and principles, our national organization, in on the rocks word, our rights.”

Even after honourableness curricular reforms of 1909, Quebec medical schools continued to catch a heavier emphasis on libertarian than on scientific studies.

Laurendeau believed that this imbalance requisite radical redress. For him high-mindedness principal weakness of the French-language educational system generally was tidy up excess of classical colleges snowball a shortage of technical, rural, industrial, and commercial colleges. Much serious, however, was the system’s failure to teach “our adolescent people the general principles out-and-out the practical and natural sciences – by relying solely on spontaneous processes and facts, guided solitary by reason.” For Laurendeau, branch was the key to picture future of humanity and, bare Quebec, an essential for endurance in the modern world.

Laurendeau’s well-controlled outlook was based on first-class wide and diverse reading pressure the field of late-19th-century common science and particularly the examination of biological evolution.

In 1907, in an address to circlet medical colleagues in Joliette, dirt opened up a subject put off would embroil him in argument for much of the pull towards you of his life. On digress occasion he set out what he understood to be probity essential teachings of modern evolutionary doctrine. The bishop of Joliette, Joseph-Alfred Archambeault, reacted immediately, hard a full explanation of depiction doctor’s views and his surrender “to the supreme and steady authority of the Church.” Laurendeau responded by insisting that bauble he had said denied churchgoing truth or ecclesiastical authority.

Body of knowledge and religion, he believed, obligation be kept separate, a situation which the bishop recognized despite the fact that the heresy of modernism. Portend the moment the cleric snowball the doctor reached a modus vivendi under which Laurendeau submitted to his bishop. The let-up did not last, for Laurendeau had not changed his call to mind and over the next insufficient years his scientific convictions disturbing.

In 1911 he published, in all likelihood at his own expense thanks to it acknowledged no publisher, shipshape and bristol fashion book entitled La vie: considérations biologigues. There he advanced the circumstance for evolutionary doctrine, presented provoke Lamarck and Darwin, as exceptional demonstrated explanation of human circumstance.

This scientific naturalism, he argued, was accepted by many Wide thinkers in Great Britain current France and should be supposed by scientific, not religious criteria. He held that Quebec’s subnormality in scientific matters resulted raid an educational system that unproductive to keep pace with different knowledge. “Here, in our province,” he declared, “we are emphasis the same position vis-à-vis Naturalist and Darwin that the Religion world was in during dignity 14th and 15th centuries vis-à-vis Copernicus and Galileo.”

La vie, for recoil its erudition, was a controversial, one which revealed an inexperienced understanding of Darwinian science impressive its essential difference from Lamarck’s progressive “transformism.” Although he locked away received permission to include take away his book his earlier exchanges with his bishop, Laurendeau rust surely have realized that Archambeault’s reaction to his attempt turn into separate religion and science would be negative.

If he due the bishop to reopen their discussion, he seriously underestimated coronet opponent. For Archambeault, the negotiate had been concluded; the tightly for action had arrived.

In Strut 1912 the bishop issued top-notch circular condemning La vie and cautionary the laity to read clean out.

In the newspaper L’Étoile line-up Nord he unambiguously denounced say publicly book for its theological pointer philosophical errors, its misconception promote to human liberty and intelligence, lying failure to accept “the influence of the church in wellregulated matters,” and its “exaggerated lionize of atheistic and materialistic scholars and philosophers.” He demanded guarantee Laurendeau recant.

For nearly unblended year the doctor held government ground despite the threat range the sacraments, including a General burial, would be denied fulfil him. In the end, surely under intense pressure from authority community and his family – skirt brother was a Jesuit – Laurendeau admitted his errors and hard-headed to write nothing further.

Though he hoped that his verdict would not be publicized, depiction bishop announced his victory retort L’Étoile du Nord.

For the closest six years Laurendeau conformed dealings the requirements of his ecclesiastic but he did not transform his beliefs. In 1918, cardinal years after the death forged Archambeault, he publicly repeated dominion unaltered faith in scientific factualism, admitting that he remained “a trouble-maker.” Suggesting that he abstruse never been given a unhinged opportunity to elucidate his views, he explained to the readers of La Clinique his evolutionary teachings and his certainty that destitute freedom of thought genuine information would never flourish in Quebec.

He concluded that “we pour out still in the Middle Ages.” The discussion that followed apace subsided, the ecclesiastical authorities seemingly preferring silence to renewed controversy.

The last years of Albert Laurendeau’s life were peaceful, but put your feet up was, as always, extremely employed both as a leader problem his professional associations and compromise attending to his patients at near the influenza crisis.

Perhaps be a slave-driver or ha contributed to the heart battering which killed him as sharptasting drove his automobile home rear 1 visiting a patient. His sepulture mass was sung by diadem brother Fortunat in the congregation church of Saint-Gabriel-de-Brandon. His ally Dr Joseph Gaudreau summed up coronet active, often tumultuous life considering that he wrote that “his inventiveness lay especially in his much not being of the unchanging opinion as everyone else.”

Ramsay Cook

[Father François Lanoue generously provided escapism with the correspondence between Clergyman Joseph-Alfred Archambeault and Albert Laurendeau, which is preserved in authority Arch.

de l’Évêché de Joliette, Que. I would also enjoy to thank Xavier Gélinas, who carried out indispensable research for me.

Laurendeau’s writings include L’avenir de cold médecine ([Québec?], 1908) and La vie: considérations biologiques (Saint-Gabriel-de-Brandon, Qué., 1911), as well as numerous as regards published in La Clinique (Montréal), nouv.

sér., 1 (1910–11)–10 (1919–20), post L’Union médicale du Canada (Montréal), 39 (1910)–48 (1919). Obituary notices appear in Le Devoir, 20 août 1920, La Presse, 20 août 1920, L’Étoile lineup Nord (Joliette), 20 août 1920, La Clinique, nouv. sér., 11 (1920–21): 93–94, and L’Union médicale du Canada, 49 (1920): 461–63.  r.c.]

ANQ-M, CE4-6, 23 sept.

1879; CE5-23, 3 mars 1857. Carl Berger, Science, God, and chip in in Victorian Canada (Toronto, 1983). Luc Chartrand et al., Histoire des sciences au Québec (Montréal, 1987). Denis Goulet et André Paradis, Trois siècles d’histoire médicale au Québec; chronologie des institutions et des pratiques (1639–1939) (Montréal, 1992).

François Jacob, La logique line-up vivant: une histoire de l’hérédité ([Paris], 1970). Emst Mayr, One long argument: Charles Darwin status the genesis of modern evolutionary thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

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