an inevitable confusion.

A patient on arriving was often laid in the bed and in the sheets of a
man who had had the itch, and had just died.

The department reserved for madmen being very confined, two were put to
sleep together. Two madmen in the same sheets! Nature revolts at the
very thought of it.

In the ward of St. Francis, reserved exclusively for men having the
smallpox, there were sometimes, for want of other space, as many as six
adults or eight children in a bed not a metre and a half wide.

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 o