Plague: A Story of Smallpox in Montreal

by Michael Bliss, Gerald A. Evans (Foreword)

In January 1885, as the people of Montreal celebrated one of the greatest winter carnivals of the century, a deadly epidemic inched its way through the city streets. When the case of a railway porter suffering from smallpox was gravely mishandled, what followed was a “carnival of death” causing the preventable demise of over 3,000 Montrealers.

In Plague, historian Michael Bliss uncovers one of the most remarkable untold stories in Canadian history. Crafted through thorough and comprehensive research, Bliss recounts this tale of carnage and humanity in an engaging and vividly detailed format. Now updated with a foreword by infectious diseases expert Gerald A. Evans, this new edition of Plague puts forth an unflinching portrayal of the city of Montreal featuring quack doctors, French-Canadian strongmen, black-robed priests, crusading journalists, Louis Riel, and more.

Bliss depicts how every single death could have been avoided through vaccination even as the epidemic turned people against each other. The book shows how troops had to be called upon to guard smallpox hospitals against anti-vaccination rioters. In an uncanny mirroring of modern day, the whole city of Montreal was quarantined by the rest of North America as a charnel house of disease and death.

Bliss paints a picture of a Montreal routed by divisions and brought to its knees by an epidemic. By bringing to life the last epidemic of smallpox to devastate a city in the Western world, he writes a stark history of life, living, and the human condition. This book is a thriller, a horror story, and a parable about the infectious diseases that have shocked our times.

372 pages, Paperback

Published March 3, 2026

About the author

Michael Bliss was a Canadian historian. He was an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a member of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Costa Voutsinas · Rating 5 out of 5]

When deciding to read this book, I was not aware that the author, Michael Bliss, had written it in 1991. As a medical professional x 36 years and recently retired, I was sure that I would still enjoy a look back at the smallpox era in my hometown of Montreal. This book is a work of art - a detailed retrospective that sheds light on the many variables, most of them preventable even in 1885, that led to the numerous deaths of so many Montrealers, the vast majority of them, children. Bliss paints a picture of 19th century Montreal, Quebec, and Canada, and how a city divided by culture, race, wealth, education, and language was the perfect petri-dish for smallpox to expand its reach and easily sicken so many. So many of these variables are still present, to a different degree, in today's Quebec; so many of the reasons that the health care system could not act quickly enough to implement existing knowledge and resources to optimize infection control management and prevent smallpox from spreading seemingly still exist today in our post-Covid world of disinformation, fear, ignorance, and social media influenced division and mistrust of medicine....and that is quite sad. The author describes the ease at which self-appointed 'doctors' were quick to instill a fear of vaccination and mandatory isolation rules for the population, likely due to the lack of education of the eastern edge of the city, populated by the poorer French-Canadians......nowadays, these online predators, many with a Phd in Facebookology, are able to convey an anti-vaccine message to those too ignorant to understand the science that has existed for hundreds of year, including the period covered by the book. A fascinating read that portrays how much Montreal....Canada.....North America...or the world has evolved or perhaps hasn't.