might give you two sous"; but they will not thrust their advice upon the poor with wounding contempt as the English do.
If you would obtain the most striking possible contrast of the hospital workings of the old and new régimes, comparison should be made of the authentic plan of the old hospital under the kings of France, and the new hospital of the Institut Pasteur under the directorship of M. Duclaux. Under the old system, patients suffering from various maladies, all more or less contagious, lay four in one bed, two with their heads above, two with their heads below, the legs of the four touching. We may imagine the rest of the details in keeping with this frightful situation—sanitary details not improved between the eighth and eighteenth centuries—food, attendance of doctors, surgeons, and nurses of the worst and coarsest kind, sickness not other than a filthy and hideous visitation of destiny, the inevitable precursor of the common ditch of burial. One wonders what degree of physical despair and disgust it was necessary to reach in those days to face the horrors of a public hospital. The courage such awful contact entailed means, to me, greater far than any involved in fronting the vicissitudes of battle. To die untended and forsaken on the bloodiest field of history, with unchanged linen, unwashed and unbound wounds, the visible prey of vultures, without hope of
