Paris: With Pen and Pencil / Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business

by D. W. Bartlett

There are two hospitals appropriated entirely to the use of men who have no hope of immediate cure, and are troubled with chronic ailments. The buildings are large and airy, and will accommodate four or five hundred.

The hospital of St. Louis, in Rue des Recollets, is very large, containing eight hundred beds. It is used for the special treatment of scrofula and cutaneous diseases. Persons able to pay, do so, but the poor are received without. It has very spacious bath accommodations, and it is estimated that as many as one hundred and forty thousand baths have been served in the establishment in the course of a year. The baths are in two large rooms, each containing fifty baths. The water is conducted to them in pipes, and every variety of mineral and sulphurous bath is given, as well as vapor and all kinds of water baths. The institution is very well managed, its work being all done within its walls, and so far is this principle carried, that the leeches needed for the diseased are cultivated in an artificial pond upon the premises.

In the Rue de Sevres is a hospital for incurable women It will accommodate six hundred women and seventy children. There are a few pictures in this establishment which are worth noticing. The Annunciation, the Flight into Egypt, and a Guardian Angel, possess great beauty.

The Louecine Hospital is for the reception of all females suffering with syphilitic diseases. It makes up three hundred beds, fifty of which are for children. The number of persons treated in Paris is more than two thousand every year, and the mortality is very slight.

Medical men dislike this hospital, for the diseases are such as to render their duties very unpleasant, but to insure proper attendance, a regulation exists that every physician before making an application for a place in any of the hospitals, shall serve in the Louecine.

The Rouchefoucald Hospital is principally for the reception of old and worn-out servants, and is of course not kept up by state funds, though it is overseen by the government. Persons who enter the institution pay a sum of money, and are entitled to a room, fire, and food, so long as they live, and some enter even as young as the age of twenty. There is another establishment in Paris where only the middling classes are received, and who pay for the attention they receive. Single men who have no homes of their own, when attacked by violent diseases, can by paying a moderate sum enter this institution and be well cared for.

I cannot even mention a tenth part of the hospitals or charitable institutions of Paris, and will only allude to one or two more which are a little peculiar. There are, for example, nurseries, where poor women who must leave home for work in factories or similar places, can in the morning leave their babies, return occasionally to nurse them, and take them away at night. If a child is weaned, it has a little basket of his own. A very small sum of money is paid for this care, and as the nurseries have the best of medical attention, some mothers bring them for that purpose alone. There are public soup establishments to which any person with a soup-ticket can go and demand food. The tickets are dispensed with some care to persons in needy circumstances. In each of the twelve arrondissements of Paris there is a bureau for the relief of poor women having large families. When proper representations are made by such females struggling to keep from the alms-house, an allowance is made of bread, firing, meat, and clothing, and sometimes money is given. There are sometimes as many as thirty thousand dependent in this manner for a part of their income upon the state. Hence, bureaus are excellent institutions, inasmuch as prevention is always easier than cure. To save struggling families from the humiliation of a complete downfall to the poor-house, small weekly allowances are made, and in such a way that their pride need not be touched, for it is often done with such secrecy that even the intimate friends of the recipients are unaware of the relation existing between them and the state. Such an arrangement as this is needed in all the great cities of the world. London suffers from the want of it. In some places the parish authorities are at liberty to make grants to poor families, but it is nowhere done with such a system and with such a delicacy as in Paris.

Another of the charitable institutions of Paris lends money upon movable effects, the interest charged being very low. This is an excellent provision for emergencies in the lives of poor persons. There are at least a million and a half of articles pledged at this institution yearly, and its receipts are from twenty-six to twenty-eight millions a year. In winters of famine the public are sometimes allowed to pledge property without paying any interest upon it when redeemed. The Mont de Pietie, is the name of this institution, and it has branches all over Paris, and has in its employ, as clerks and otherwise, three hundred persons.

There are savings' banks in Paris specially adapted to the wants of the poor, and to encourage in them the habit of accumulating property, though in very small sums. A deposit of one franc is received, and one person cannot hold but two thousand francs at one time in one bank of the kind. This institution, however, is not superior to those of its kind in many other countries.