d 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