REPORT ON THE HOSPITALS. 159 



Academy, and the Public ? This authority consisted of 

 several administrators (the type of them, it is said, is not 

 quite lost), who looked upon the poor as their patrimony, 

 who devoted to them a disinterested but unproductive 

 activity ; who were impatient at any amelioration, the 

 germ of which had not developed itself either in their 

 own heads, or in those of certain men, philanthropic by 

 nature, or by the privilege of their station. Ah ! if by 

 enlightened and constant care that vast asylum, opened 

 to poverty and sickness, near Notre-Dame, had been 

 then conducted, now sixty years ago, only in a tolerable 

 way, we should have understood how, in taking human 

 nature into consideration, the promoters of this great 

 benefit would have repelled an examination that seemed 

 to throw a doubt on their zeal and on their good sense. 

 But alas ! let us take from Bailly's work a few traits of 

 the moderate and faithful picture that he drew of the 

 Hotel Dieu, and you shall decide, Gentlemen, whether 

 the susceptibility of the administrators was authorized ; 

 whether, on the contrary, they ought not themselves to 

 have anticipated the unhoped-for help from the king's 

 power, united to science, which was now offered to them ; 

 whether by retarding certain ameliorations by a single 

 day, they did not commit the crime of lese-humanity. 



In 1786, infirmities of all sorts were treated at the 

 Hotel Dieu : surgical maladies, chronic maladies, conta- 

 gious maladies, female diseases, infantine diseases, &c. 

 Every thing was admitted, but all presented an inevitable 

 confusion. 



A patient on arriving was often laid in the bed and in 

 the sheets of a man who had had the itch, and had just 

 died. 



The department reserved for madmen being very con- 



