Category: Workman

Dr. Joseph Workman, Pioneer in the Treatment of Mental Illness

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If you have been watching the miniseries “Alias Grace” on CBC television or Netflix, you may remember a scene featuring a grey-haired gentleman with long sideburns. That character was based on the real-life physician Dr. Joseph Workman, known as the Father of Canadian Psychiatry.

The television show is based on the book of the same name by Margaret Atwood, a fictionalized account of the life of Grace Marks, an Irish-born servant girl convicted in 1843 of a double murder near Toronto. Grace was held at the Provincial Lunatic Asylum in Toronto at about the time that Dr. Workman became superintendent of the asylum.

Neither the book nor the television show makes it clear whether Grace was insane, or whether she was guilty of murder. There is little doubt, however, that Joseph Workman was a kind and intelligent man who made important contributions to the treatment of mental illness. In fact, he came from quite an extraordinary family.

Joseph (1805-1894) was born in Ballymacash, near Lisburn, County Antrim, Ireland (now Northern Ireland). His parents were Joseph Workman Sr. (1759-1848) and Catherine Gowdie (1769-1872). Joseph Jr. was the fourth of nine children — eight boys and one girl. His only sister, Ann Workman (1809-1882), who married Montreal hardware merchant Henry Mulholland, was my direct ancestor. 

The Workmans brought up their children to value hard work, education and Christian charity. Holding liberal views, they were members of the Non-subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland and they eventually became Unitarians. 

The Workmans were not wealthy and they lived in a cozy cottage in the village, surrounded by fields and farmland. Joseph Sr. worked as a miller and as a teacher, then as land steward (manager) for a local landowner.

Joseph Jr. attended school around Lisburn and, after graduation, worked as a land surveyor for three years. In 1819, his oldest brother, Benjamin, immigrated to Montreal, where he became a teacher and newspaper publisher. Over the next 10 years, the Workman siblings, tired of the poverty, poor harvests and religious strife around them, all left Ireland for Canada. Joseph and his parents arrived in Montreal in 1829.

Joseph taught school and studied to become a doctor at the same time, obtaining a medical degree from McGill University in 1835. His thesis focused on the infectious nature of cholera (a radical idea at the time) after he watched the deadly disease sweep through the city in 1832 and 1834. 

He married Elizabeth Wasnidge in 1835 and the couple eventually had 10 children, four of whom died young. In 1836, they moved to Toronto, where Joseph ran the Wasnidge family hardware business. For 10 years, he kept up his reading on medicine before finally leaving the business to concentrate on medicine. He built up a busy practice and taught at the Toronto School of Medicine.

He was appointed superintendent of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum in 1853 and remained there until 1882.

At first, Joseph knew little about mental illness, but it was easy to see that the asylum was filthy and overcrowded, and that the patients were neglected. He improved the institution’s efficiency and made sure the patients had good food and generous amounts of alcohol. His treatment approach focused on moral therapy:  kindness, truthfulness, social entertainment and religious instruction. Although cure rates did not improve, he did make progress in the humane treatment of the mentally ill. 

The Workman brothers all achieved success in Canada. Alexander Workman became mayor of Ottawa, William was a successful hardware merchant and mayor of Montreal, Thomas became a prosperous businessman, and Benjamin had several careers, including teaching and medicine. Joseph and Benjamin were instrumental in establishing the Unitarian Church in Toronto and Montreal.

But biographer Christine L.M. Johnston considered Joseph to be the greatest of them all “because he radically changed the whole field of psychiatry, and not just in Canada. He influenced as well American superintendents of Lunatic Asylums…. Like most pioneers, he did not claim to be totally original – he introduced the new ideas initiated in Europe. Yet he was constantly exploring new avenues on his own after that.” 1

This article is also posted on www.genealogyensemble.com

See also:

Janice Hamilton, “Henry Mulholland, Montreal Hardware Merchant,”Writing Up the Ancestors,March 17, 2016, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2016/03/henry-mulholland-montreal-hardware.html

Footnotes: 

  1. Christine Johnston. “The Irish Connection: Benjamin and Joseph and their Brothers and their Coats of Many Colours,” CUUHS Meeting, May 1982, Paper #4, p. 6.

Other sources: 

Christine I. M. Johnston, The Father of Canadian Psychiatry: Joseph Workman, Victoria: The Ogden Press, 2000.

Thomas E. Brown, “Joseph Workman,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12, University of Toronto Press/Université Laval, 1990, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/workman_joseph_12E.html, accessed Oct. 23, 2017. 

The Digger, One Family’s Journey from Ballymacash to Canada, Lisburn.com, http://lisburn.com/history/digger/Digger-2011/digger-19-08-2011.html, accessed Oct. 20, 2017.

There is an extensive database of the Workman family online called A Family Orchard: Leaves from the Workman Tree, http://freepages.misc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~database/WORKMAN.htm

Henry Mulholland, Montreal Hardware Merchant

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With one of the largest St. Patrick’s Day parades in the world, Montreal has long celebrated its Irish heritage. Waves of Irish immigrants came to Canada in the 19th century, peaking in 1815 and 1831, and a surge of immigrants arrived during the famine in Ireland, between 1847 and 1849.

Many Irish Catholic immigrants settled in Montreal, while the majority of Protestants moved on to the United States or Upper Canada, but my great-great-grandfather Henry Mulholland (1809-1887), an Irish-born Protestant, put down deep roots in Montreal. 

Henry Mulholland

I do not know where he was born or who his parents were, but the name Mulholland is most common in Ulster (now Northern Ireland). Nor do I know when, why or with whom, if anyone, he came to Canada. The first record I have found is his 1834 marriage to Ann Workman at Montreal’s Anglican Christ Church. 

Mulholland may have known the Workman family in Ireland. They immigrated from Ballymacash, near Belfast, in the 1820s. Ann Workman’s six brothers established themselves in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa in the fields of publishing, business, medicine and politics. Her brothers William and Thomas were partners in Frothingham and Workman, the largest hardware importing, wholesale and manufacturing company in Canada. 

Mulholland also went into the hardware business. Perhaps he started his career with his brother-in-law’s company, or perhaps he worked his way up in Benjamin Brewster’s hardware firm. In 1842, the first year Lovell published its annual Montreal city directory, there was a listing for “Brewster, B. and Company (H. Mulholland and John Evans), wholesale and retail hardware.” Lovell’s 1851 directory of Canadian businesses listed “Brewster & Mulholland, importers of shelf and heavy hardware of every description, 177 and 179 Saint Paul Street.”

In 1859, Mulholland joined with a new partner, Joel C. Baker, to form Mulholland and Baker, hardware merchants and ironmongers. A lawyer, Baker was married to Louise Workman, daughter of William Workman. 

Lovell’s 1876 edition advertised Mullholland and Baker as “Importers of hardware, iron, steel, tin, Canada plates, window glass; manufacturers of cut nails, and also of the new chisel pointed cut nail.”  Their customers included small shopkeepers, merchants and blacksmiths in southern and central Quebec. The company opened a branch in Guelph, Ontario and began importing raw materials and manufacturing nails.   

During this period of Montreal’s history, industries and railways were being built, utilities developed and banks established. Like many of his business colleagues, Mulholland was involved with several of these enterprises. Many of these men also knew each other through their memberships in the Mechanics’ Institute of Montreal, an organization founded to provide education to working men and youth for a modest fee. 

Mulholland was a director of the New City Gas Company, founded in 1847 to compete with the Montreal Gas Light Company. New City Gas burned coal to produce gas that was used to light the homes and streets of Montreal. Some years later, when the Sun Mutual Life Insurance Company of Montreal was founded in 1871, Henry Mulholland was a member of its first board of directors.

Henry Mulholland’s house was near the corner of Sherbrooke Street and Drummond. This photo appeared in a book called The Saga of Sherbrooke Street, Yesterday and Today, by Arthur Kittson

He was also one of 15 managing directors of the Montreal City and District Savings Bank. Most of Montreal’s banks were set up to serve commercial interests, but the City and District was founded in 1846 by the Bishop of Montreal and a group of businessmen to help ordinary workers save their money. In 1866, the year Mulholland was serving as president of the City and District, a group of Irish-Americans known as the Fenians raided the Canadian border.

Many customers were afraid the crisis would cause the bank to fail and demanded their deposits back, but Mulholland and two other bank directors formed a committee to deal with the situation and prevented the bank’s failure.  

Mulholland did not succeed, however, in preventing the bankruptcy of his own hardware company. It went out of business in 1879, a situation that appears to have been fallout from the bankruptcy of an individual whose mortgage Mulholland had guaranteed. 

Mulholland had to sell his family’s home to cover his debts, and he and his wife moved to a smaller house nearby. For the next few years, court battles and appeals took up much of his time. After his wife died in 1882, he moved in with his daughter Ann, her husband, Dr. George Wilkins, and their children. Henry Mulholland died in 1887.   

Photo Credit:

“H. Mulholland, Montreal, QC, 1886”, II-79921.1, Wm. Notman & Son, McCord Museum, http://www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/collection/artifacts/II-79921.1?Lang=1&accessnumber=II-79921.1

Notes:

Several of the organizations Mulholland helped establish are still in operation today. The Montreal City and District Bank is now the Laurentian Bank and the Sun Life evolved into Sun Life Financial. The Mechanics’ Institute of Montreal is now known as the Atwater Library and Computer Centre.

Several years ago, archaeologists from the Pointe-à-Callière museum explored the site of Mulholland and Baker’s tool sharpening service. See “Pointe-à-Callière Archaeological Field School: The Mulholland and Baker Years”, http://www.ecoledefouilles.org/default.asp?id=60.  

“Old Montreal, Mulholland and Baker in 1873”, http://www.vieux.montreal.qc.ca/inventaire/fiches/eng/mulholland.htm briefly describes the history of Mulholland and Baker.

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/en/index.php, has biographies of many of Mulholland’s business associates, including William Workman, Thomas Workman and John Fotheringham. Mulholland also knew entrepreneur and politician Luther Holton. See Henry C. Klassen. Luther H. Holton, A Founding Canadian Entrepreneur. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2001.

For an account of the City and District’s early days, see the “Origins and Early History of the Montreal City and District Savings Bank 1846-1871” by John Irwin Cooper, http://www.cchahistory.ca/journal/CCHA1945-46/Cooper.html

“New City Gas and Mechanic’s Institute” http://montrealhistory.org/2010/01/new-city-gas-mechanics-institute/, outlines the early history of gas lighting in Montreal. The site montrealhistory.org publishes articles focused on people and events associated with the Mechanics’ Institute.

Highlights of the history of the Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada can be found on the website La Mémoire du Québec (in French only.) http://www.memoireduquebec.com/wiki/index.php?title=Sun_Life_Assurance_Company_of_Canada_%28compagnie_d%27assurance-vie%29  

To search issues of the Lovell Directories for Montreal from 1842 to 2010, go to http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/lovell/

Henry and Ann Mulholland had seven children, five of whom grew to adulthood: Benjamin, Joseph, Ann, Jane and Henry. I will write about the family in another post.