Michel Bertier

Michel Bertier, also written Berthier, was a French-born surgeon who served as surgeon-major of Quebec and as surgeon to the Hôtel-Dieu of that town in the first half of the eighteenth century. Born in 1695 to Antoine Bertier and Antoinette Cochon of Saumur in Anjou, he often worked alongside Michel Sarrazin and was at the bedside of Bishop Saint-Vallier in 1727. Around 1720 he became the first member of his profession charged with supervising and inspecting ships arriving up the St Lawrence for infectious disease, an early form of quarantine in New France. He kept up his duties through the smallpox epidemic of about 1730, and in 1740 he tended typhus patients from the ship Rubis, caught the disease himself and died at Quebec on 5 September 1740. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography records a canon's complaint that his frequent bloodletting hastened the death of Bishop Lauberivière, and answers it by pointing to Bertier's own death in the same epidemic.