- Salpêtrière Hospice
- (Hospital), ParisFounded in the seventeenth century by a 1656 decree of Louis XIV as one of four great hospices in Paris, the former "little arsensal" (or Salpetery—la Salpêtrière) was dedicated to receiving sick, destitute, and aged women of all descriptions. Several wings were subsequently added, such as one for criminal women in 1684 where prostitutes were incarcerated in the eighteenth century. Late in the eighteenth century, a medical division (infirmary) was authorized and the psychiatric wards renovated. Pinel famously installed gentler methods of treatment during the French Revolution, and in 1882 a chair for Jean-Martin Charcot in nervous diseases was created at the Salpêtrière, after which it became a noted center for neuropsychiatric training. Charcot’s successors in the chair after 1893 were Fulgence Raymond (1844–1910) and, after Raymond’s death, Jules-Joseph Dejerine (1849–1917). (In 1900, Dejerine wrote an important two-volume work on the Symptomatology of Neurological Illness [Sémiologie des affections du système nerveux], in which was added a fair amount of psychiatry as well.)
Edward Shorter. 2014.
