Introduction: The Body Urban

“There are hundreds of loads of rotten and foul matter carted away from this city of Montreal that would win a prize for sickening and pungent stench in competition with the whole world,” bemoaned a disgusted sanitary engineer in a plea for stricter hygienic measures in the late nineteenth century. For their part, the authors of a promotional brochure on Montreal adopted a decidedly more celebratory view of the city’s atmosphere, affirming that “the incessant noise, the brouhaha, the busy crowd hurrying along, the nonstop traffic in the streets” made visitors immediately aware that they had arrived in a great