to the hospitals without
any order, by simply presenting themselves at the doors. Medical advice
is given at some of the hospitals on certain days to poor persons. The
hospitals of Paris are of three kinds; the general, open to all
complaints for which a special hospital is not provided; the special
hospitals, for the treatment of special diseases; and the alms-houses.
The hospitals support more than twelve thousand aged men and women,
receive more than eighty thousand patients, and have constantly under
treatment six thousand persons.

Among the hospitals I may mention Bricetre, situated on the road to
Fontainbleau. It is upon very high ground, and is the healthiest of all
the hospitals from its position and arrangements. It is used as an
asylum for poor old men, and for male lunatics. The old men have every
encouragement to work, for they receive pay for their labor, slight, of
course, and the money is devoted to giving them better food and clothes
than the usual hospital allowance, which is some soup, one pound and a
quarter of bread, four ounces of meat, vegetables, cheese, and a pint of
wine each day. When seventy years old, the quantity of wine is doubled,
and when a person has been thirty years an inmate of the house, the
quantity of everything is doubled. Three thousand beds are made up for
the indigent, and eight hundred for lunatics. The latter, of course,
occupies a distinct part of the building.

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 p