This ward was full of patients.  The operations were performed in their presence.  Bailly says, “We see there the preparations for the torment; there are heard the cries of the tormented.  He who has to suffer the next day has before him a picture of his own future sufferings; he who has passed through this terrible trial, must be deeply moved at those cries so similar to his own, and must feel his agonies repeated; and these terrors, these emotions, he experiences in the midst of the progress of inflammation or suppuration, retarding his recovery, and at the hazard of his life."...  “To what purpose,” Bailly justly exclaims, “would you make an unfortunate man suffer, if there is not a probability of saving him, and unless we increase that probability by all possible precautions?”

The heart aches, the mind becomes confused, at the sight of so much misery; and yet this hospital, so little in harmony with its intended purpose, still existed sixty years ago.  It is in a capital, the centre of the arts, of knowledge, of polished manners; it is in an age renowned for the development of public wealth, for the progress of luxury, for the ruinous creation of a crowd of establishments devoted to amusements, to worldly and futile pleasures; it is by the side of the palace of an opulent archbishop; it is at the gate of a sumptuous cathedral, that the unfortunate, under the deceitful mask of charity, underwent such dreadful tortures.  To whom should we impute the long duration of this vicious and inhuman organization?

To the professors of the art?  No, no, Gentlemen!  By an inconceivable anomaly the physicians, the surgeons, never obtained more than a secondary, a subordinate influence over the administration of the hospitals.  No, no, the sentiments of the medical body for the poor could not be doubted, at an epoch and in a country where Dr. Anthony Petit thus answered the irritated queen, Marie Antoinette:  “Madam, if I came not yesterday to Versailles, it was because I was attending the lying-in of a peasant, who was in the greatest danger.  Your Majesty errs, however, in supposing that I neglect the Dauphin for the poor; I have hitherto treated the young child with as much attention and care as if he had been the son of one of your grooms.”

Preference was granted to the most suffering, to those in most danger, disregarding rank and fortune; such was, you see, Gentlemen, the sublime rule of the French Medical Corps; and such is still its gospel.  I want no other proof of it than those admirable words addressed by our fellow labourer Larrey, to his friend Tanchou, when wounded at the Battle of Montmirail:  “Your wound is slight, sir; we have only room and straw in this ambulance for serious wounds.  They will take you into that stable.”

The medical corps could not, therefore, with any reason be accused or suspected in regard to the old Hotel Dieu of Paris.

If economy be invoked, I find an answer quite a-propos in Bailly:  the daily allowance for the patients at the Hotel Dieu was notably higher than in other establishments in the capital more charitably organized.