oe F 
AS 
160 BAILLY. 
fined, two were put to sleep together. Two madmen in 
the same sheets! Nature revolts at the very thought of 
it. . 
In the ward of St. Francis, reserved exclusively for 
men having the smallpox, there were sometimes, for 
want of other space, as many as six adults or eight chil- 
dren in a bed not a metre and a half wide. 
The women attacked with this frightful disease were 
mixed in the ward of St. Monique with others who had 
only a simple fever, and the latter fell an inevitable prey 
to the hideous contagion, in the very place where, full of 
confidence, they had hoped to recover their health. 
Women with child, women in their confinement, were 
equally crowded, pell-mell, on narrow and _ infected 
truckle-beds. 
Nor let it be supposed that I have borrowed from 
Bailly’s Report some purely exceptional cases, belonging 
to those cruel times, when whole populations, suffering 
under some epidemic, were tried beyond all human an- 
ticipation. In their usual state, the beds of the Hotel 
Dieu, which were not a metre and a half wide, contained 
four, and often six patients; they were placed alternately 
head and feet, the feet of one touching the shoulders of 
the next; each had only for his share of space 25 centi- 
metres (9 inches); now, a man of medium size, lying 
with his arms close to his body, is 48 centimetres (16 
inches) broad at the shoulders. ‘The poor patients then 
could not keep within the bed but by lying on their side 
perfectly immovable ; no one could turn without pushing, 
without waking his neighbour; they therefore used to 
agree, as far as their illness would allow, for some of 
them to remain up part of the night in the space between 
the beds, whilst the others slept; and when the ap- 
