MADRY, JEAN, garrison surgeon at Trois-Rivières, lieutenant and clerk to the chief barber and surgeon of the king; b. c. 1625; d. 1669.

He came to Canada around 1651, and from 1653 to 1655 he was garrison corporal and surgeon at the Trois-Rivières fort. In 1657 he was settled in Quebec, and in the autumn of that year he sailed for France. On 2 April 1658 François de Barnoin, chief barber to the king, conferred upon him the master’s status and authorized him to confer it upon others. The letters were however not ratified until November 1663. On the tenth of that month Madry became lieutenant and clerk to Barnoin and thereby obtained powers of surveillance over the surgeons in the colony.

Madry was a churchwarden of Notre-Dame of Quebec in 1663. On 7 October Claude Charron and he became the first two aldermen for the town; they were to lose their function shortly afterwards, to be replaced by a syndic. Madry had also been made one of the directors of the Tadoussac trading organization by a lease dated 4 March, which was annulled on the following 4 October.

On 13 Oct. 1668 he rendered fealty and homage to Bishop Laval* in the name of the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu for their arriere-fief of Saint-Laurent on the Île d’Orléans.

Madry died of drowning on 26 July 1669 during a trip to Trois-Rivières and was buried on 31 July in the paupers’ cemetery of the Hôtel-Dieu at Quebec, according to a wish that he had expressed.

Madry was a good surgeon. He seems however to have been of a rather stubborn, violent, and over-bearing character, if we are to judge by his obstinacy in refusing to accept the guardianship of the under-age children of Guillaume Gauthier, whose cousin he was through his wife, and by the obstacle that he tried to put in the way of Pierre Rouffray’s marriage on the pretext that Rouffray was “his domestic servant, having been assigned to him by order of the Council.” Like several of his colleagues at that time, Madry often appeared before the Conseil Souverain to claim fees that he considered were due him. On several occasions he reappeared as a plaintiff for other reasons, but most of the time in money matters.

On 19 Jan. 1660 at Quebec he had married Françoise Duquet, who was 15 years of age and a sister of the notary Pierre Duquet; he had no children. After the surgeon’s death his wife remarried in 1670; her second husband was Olivier Morel* de La Durantaye, a king’s counsellor on the Conseil Souverain. Madry owned the fief of Grand-Pré at La Canardière, which the Jesuits had granted him in 1659. Later he was to build on it a house which was called the Château Bigot.

Gabriel Nadeau

Jug. et délib., I. Ahern, Notes pour l’histoire de la médecine. Boissonnault, Histoire de la faculté de médecine de Laval, 55f. Raymond Douville, “Chirurgiens, barbiers-chirurgiens et charlatans de la région trifluvienne sous le régime français,” Cahiers des Dix, XV (1950), 110f. J.-E. Roy, “Jean Madry,” BRH, XX (1914), 156f. P.-G. Roy, L’Île d’Orléans (Québec, 1928); La ville de Québec.

Revisions based on:
Bibliothèque et Arch. Nationales du Québec, Centre d’arch. de Québec, CE301-S1, 19 janv. 1660, 31 juill. 1669.