(64) Royal Leper Sanctuary of Upper Canada

The particular attar that greets the shopper or tourist when she steps inside the Eaton’s Centre is not due solely to 1970s ventilation equipment or the salted, greasy emissions of the food court. Its full provenance is much more historic. The odour is in fact the sole trace of the Royal Leper Sanctuary of Upper Canada whose peeling occupants were housed and trained at provincial expense on the corner of Yonge and Dundas streets for some 140 years. The present regional shopping maul, described by a visiting Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1990s as “very futuristic,” replaced the sanctuary which, despite its wonderful copper dome, twin observatories, music hall, ornamental pools, extensive orchards and gardens and handsome granite facades, had been deemed obsolete.

The taint in the air is a Victorian medication called St Patrick’s Unguent, a mixture of rye whiskey, harp seal spleens, cod oil, and according to the side of a tin here in the POWcityblog archive, “extrait de beaver.” This heavy cream was applied liberally to each leper by sanctuary staff daily with a lacrosse stick. Some thirty-thousand pint tins of St. Patrick’s Unguent were slathered on the inmates every year. The persistent residue of this treatment contaminated the soil beneath, and leeches into the basement of, the maul to this day. When you shop at the Eaton Centre you are not just spending money, you are breathing history.

editor’s note: Installed in Queen Street station by the TTC during Leprosy History Month in 1972 this enamelled metal panel memorializes the location of the Royal Leper Sanctuary of Upper Canada and all who lived there. Portrayed is Iris Fay Cerotte the characterful matriarch of the sanctuary’s women’s wing from 1837 to 1901.