Marie-Louise Landry Arseneault
The sea near Dalhousie, New Brunswick, presented formidable challenges to fishermen and ship's pilots in the early 1800s. No lighthouse marked their way into port; storms could easily drive their boats into the rocks. Like mothers and wives everywhere, Marie-Louise Arseneault feared for her husband, sons and nephews as they threaded their boats through dark seas. To help them, and likely to ease her own mind, Marie-Louise put a candle in her window to guide them home. The candle became a lamp, then a fixed beacon, and finally in 1870, a tower-style lighthouse on the site of Marie-Louise's home. Her first unofficial light likely helped bring about choice of this site for the present building; her descendants continued to keep the light until 1935 - over 100 years from that first small candle. Given federal heritage protection in 1991, "Inch Arron" beacon remains in operation and on a clear night can be seen for more than 25 kilometres.
It wasn't until the seventeenth century that the adjective ordinary got a bad name, when it came to mean "not singular or exceptional."...the ordinary woman creates knowledge out of her history as much as any other person....--Marlene Kadar, 1997
But it was not only for her light that Marie-Louise was known. She was also "femme-médicin," the medicine woman of Dalhousie. She had no medical training but rather a sound knowledge of herbs and roots gathered in the fields and then mixed with plants from her own garden. In one case, massaging the throat of a man whose discomfort prevented even opening his mouth, she helped him to swallow medicine which, in a month's time, cured him. According to his description, perhaps the only one extant, she was "a Frenchwoman, rather short, of medium build." He had come more than 60 km to find her.
She successfully amputated the finger of another man. A British sea captain, regular on the coast, arrived with an apparently incurable disease-under Marie-Louise's care in her own home for several weeks, he recovered. His gratitude took the form of a set of gold medical instruments, delivered on his next voyage.
She asked no payment; people paid according to their means. At a time when doctors were rare, she offered an important service-perhaps even a better one, inasmuch as she had a very high cure rate.
Born in 1800, Marie-Louise Landry married Louis Arseneault in 1823. They had five children. She died in 1884.
Marie Louise Landry Arseneault
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