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 anticipation.  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 centimetres (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 approaches of death nailed these unfortunate people to their place, did they not energetically curse that help, which in such a situation could only prolong their painful agony.

But it was not only that beds thus placed were a source of discomfort, of disgust; that they prevented rest and sleep; that an insupportable heat occasioned and propagated diseases of the skin and frightful vermin; that the fever patient bedewed his neighbours with his profuse perspirations; and that in the critical moment he might be chilled by contact with those whose hot fit would occur later, &c.  Still more serious effects resulted from the presence of many sick in the same bed; the food, the medicines, intended for one person, often found their way to another.  In short, Gentlemen, in those beds of multiple population, the dead often lay for hours, and sometimes whole nights, intermingled with the living.  The principal charitable establishment in Paris thus offered those dreadful coincidences, that the poets of Rome, that ancient historians have represented under King Mezentius, as the utmost extreme of barbarism.

Such was, Gentlemen, the normal state of the old Hotel Dieu.  One word, one word only, will suffice to tell what was the exceptional state:  they placed some patients on the tops or testers of those same beds, where we have found so much suffering, so many authorized maledictions.

Now, Gentlemen, let us, together with our fellow academician, cast a glance on the ward of surgical operations.