Montreal horror: inside a highly-secretive mental institution

   These slightly-unusual postcards showing the interior of the St. Jean de Dieu mental hospital show a part of a secretive and sometimes-horrific world.
   Some accounts have it that the St. Jean de Dieu mental hospital in the east end - now called Louis Hyppolite Lafontaine - they love long names don't they? - was one of the most evil places on the island.    Back before modern

mental medication was discovered, many barbaric practices were required to keep mental patients in check and they were all tried out at this place according to some accounts, mainly from Denis Lazure and Gerald Pelletier who both helped expose some of the troubles at this hospital.
  There was also a widely-read personal account from an ex-patient whose name slips my mind.  Funny story about that book, the author got Lazure to write a nice preface to his book without knowing that it was going to attack the institution and its barbaric practices. Embarrassment ensued.
      The hospital housed Maurice Duplessis, where he was treated for alcoholism and also long ago the famous poet Nelligan who was quite batty.    
   As well, there was a fire about a century ago that claimed many lives and some think that it suited the purposes of the nuns, who were glad of the extinction of a part of the facility.
   Yet another weird thing: there's supposedly a bunch of bones buried at an unofficial graveyard outside the facility, which some have dubbed the pigsty cemetery.
   The bodies are possibly those of patients who were experimented on but the details of that will likely be never fully known.

The lightened areas were wiped out by fire

    And how exactly did the hospital
manage to keep totally secret? Well the strangest thing of all is that it was technically it's own borough on the island of Montreal, or district or whatever they were known as back before the merger.
    So until the mid-60s Gamelin - which was just the mental hospital -  had its own tiny police force and fire department (probably a closet full of buckets) and yet never really had elections because technically there were no residents.

It was so big it had trains in its hallways

   I've asked a couple of times at the city to see municipal files on Gamelin but was met with a shrug. No dice.
  The moral of the story is that the religious folk that ran this hospital in whatever way they wanted due to the secrecy they were able to obtain were also subject to a backlash from that very lack of transparency.
   Their legacy has is one of darkness and suspicion and while many people surely received good treatment there, the history of the institution has been tarnished by its many years of secret-keeping.