Saints, Sinners and Hospitals

Extract

In Monsieur Vincent, a book which has been much read of late in France, the author, Henri Lavedan, describing the horrors of the Hotel Dieu or chief hospital of Paris from an eighteenth century document, remarks that conditions were doubtless worse still in the seventeenth century. Why ‘doubtless’? Does he believe, one wonders, in the nineteenth century theory of inevitable progress; is each century really better in every way than the one which preceded it?

Many years ago Lecoy de la Marche, in his Guerre aux Erreurs, Historiques, had shown the weakness of this theory when dealing with the very theme of the help given to the poor in the Middle Ages. Both seventeenth and eighteenth centuries far from marking any sort of advance showed a terrible falling off from the standards and the practice of the past.