ccur 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.

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 organiz