Abstract

This thesis examines the medical files of women suffering from neurosyphilis at the Montreal psychiatric hospital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu at the beginning of the 20th century. I argue that history and the hospital functioned differently for these women, as their lives, bodies, relations of care, and narratives were left to dissolve into dust. In the very institutions meant to preserve their bodies (i.e. the hospital) and their records (i.e. the archive) and keep them whole, my participants were evanescent, passing out of sight and out of time. This thesis examines this motion towards dissolution as things go from present to absent, and material to dust and the underlying administrative and ideological mechanisms of the hospital and the archive which encourage this process and target specific histories and lives for burial. I move away from traditional methodological and representational styles of ethnography that seeks to gather and tell stories, which, if not whole are at least complete, and ask instead what stories I can tell from partial, fragmented, and unknowable subjects.