I have cited the names of the commissioners.  At no time, and in no country, could more virtue and learning have been united.  These select men, regulating themselves in this respect according to the most common logic, felt that the task of pronouncing on a reform of the Hotel Dieu imposed on them the necessity of examining that establishment.  “We have asked,” said their interpreter, “we have asked the Board of Administration to permit us to see the hospital in detail, and accompanied by some one who could guide and instruct us ... we required to know several particulars; we asked for them, but we obtained nothing.”

We have obtained nothing!  These are the sad, the incredible words, that men so worthy of respect are obliged to insert in the first line of their report!

What then was the authority that allowed itself to be so deficient in the most usual respect towards commissioners invested with the confidence of the King, the 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, contagious 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 confined, 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 children in a bed not a metre and a half wide.