Of Hôtel-Dieu John Cross, in his memoir concerning medical education in Paris, makes the following remarks:—
The patients at l’Hôtel-Dieu vary in number from 1500 to 2000, and generally approach near to the latter number. Beside the wards for medical and surgical patients, there is a ward for the reception of women actually in labor or suffering abortion. The medical patients are far the most numerous, and eight or nine physicians are attached to Hôtel-Dieu.... The number of dressers is not limited; when I was at l’Hôtel-Dieu, above one-hundred were attached to it.... Les élèves internes of the Parisian hospitals correspond to our house-surgeons; the number of them to each hospital is limited, and at l’Hôtel-Dieu there are nearly twenty. They have their separate apartments in the hospital, are boarded in it, and have, beside board and lodging, an annual salary of about twenty guineas each. They may retain their situation for two years.
Device of the École de Médecine de Paris. (Adopted by the Faculty in 1597.) (Three storks, each holding a twig of origanum in its beak; and at the top of the design the motto “Urbi et Orbi Salus” [Health to the City and to all the World].)
Paris possesses a fourth large hospital, which as regards architectural beauty and the great consideration shown by the architect for a wise and convenient disposition of the different available spaces, certainly stands first among the hospitals of the French capital. I have introduced here a reduced copy of the plan of this hospital (Hôpital Saint-Louis), which dates back to the seventeenth century, but, much as I should like to do so, I am not able to furnish a description of the details relating to the precise purposes and the management of the institution at the present time. It is said to be largely devoted to the treatment of affections of the skin.
Tenon’s Criticisms on Hôtel-Dieu and Hôpital Saint-Louis.—Speaking of the wards in the Hôpital Saint-Louis Tenon, who wrote his treatise in 1786, says that it was a mistake to make the ceilings only eleven feet high; they should have been sixteen feet high. He commends strongly the complete separation of the hospital from the adjacent city by high surrounding walls. Only one kind of contagion, he says, should be admitted into any single ward. This precaution had not previously been observed. In the Hôpital Saint-Louis the water-closet arrangements were about as bad as they could possibly be. The same remark applies to Hôtel-Dieu, where overcrowding was at times scandalously bad. In the latter hospital there are, in the wards destined for men, 600 beds—of which number 378 are beds of the larger size, and 222 of the smaller. In the wards for women, he adds, the same predominance of large beds exists—viz., 355 larger beds, 264 of the smaller size.
Tenon says emphatically: “Beds for two or more persons should not be permitted in any hospital. These beds, on certain occasions, are occupied by four—yes, even by six persons—and as a result they are infested by vermin. Sleep is practically unattainable under such circumstances.”[[27]]
Ground Plan of the Hôpital Saint-Louis
Planned by the architect Claude Chastillon, of Paris, in 1608.