Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital (,éSalpêtriè ) is a charitable hospital in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. It is part of the and a teaching hospital of Sorbonne University.
History
The Salpêtrière was originally a gunpowder factory (saltpetre being a constituent of gunpowder), but in 1656 at the direction of Louis XIV, it was converted into a hospice for the poor women of Paris as part of the General Hospital of Paris. This main hospice was for women who were learning disabled, mentally ill or epileptic, as well as poor. In 1657 it was incorporated with the hospice of the Pitié designed specifically for beggars' children and orphans. Sheets for hospice and military clothing were produced there by the children. Between 1663 and 1673, 240 of the women at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospice were sent on a mission to populate the Americas and help build New France. They were in the total number of 768 young women recruited during the ten-year period to become known as the "King's Daughters". The Salpêtrière was much admired for the architectural designs of Libéral Bruant with the support of Louis Le Vau. Its conversion was completed in 1669. In 1684 a women's prison was added to the site with a total capacity of 300 convicted prostitutes. It provided wretched living conditions for its inmates.
On the eve of the Revolution, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospice had become the world's largest hospice, with a capacity of 10,000 "patients" and over 300 prisoners. Until the French Revolution, the Salpêtrière had no medical function: the sick were sent to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital.
During the September massacres of 1792, the Salpêtrière was stormed on the night of 3/4 September by a mob from the impoverished working-class district of the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, with the avowed intention of releasing the detained prisoners: 134 of the prostitutes were released; twenty-five madwomen were less fortunate and were dragged, some still in their chains, into the streets and murdered.
At the very end of the 18th century, the early humanitarian reforms in the treatment of the mentally ill were initiated here by Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), friend of the Encyclopédistes. The iconic image of Pinel as the liberator of the insane was created in 1876 by Tony Robert-Fleury and Pinel's sculptural monument stands before the main entrance in Place Marie-Curie, Boulevard de L'Hôpital. Pinel was the chief physician of the Salpêtrière by 1794, in charge of a 200-bed infirmary which housed a tiny proportion of the huge indigent female population. He was succeeded by his assistant Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840) who, from 1817, delivered the first systematic lectures on psychiatry in France and was the chief architect of the lunacy legislation of 30 June 1838. Esquirol was followed by Étienne Pariset; and from 1831 till 1867 the chef d'hospice was Jean-Pierre Falret (1794–1870) who contributed much to our understanding of bipolar disorder and folie à deux.
A regular visitor to the Salpêtrière from 1842 till his death more than thirty years later was Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–1875). From humble provincial origins, a long line of seafarers from Boulogne, Duchenne became one of the outstanding medical scientists of the nineteenth century. Though he never held a senior appointment in the hospital, Duchenne nevertheless made meticulous observations on neurological patients, employing a wide range of innovative diagnostic techniques. Duchenne's clinical science stood at the technical junction of electricity, photography and psychology, as recorded in his much admired De l'électrisation localisée with its associated atlas Album de photographies pathologiques (1855, 1862). His name is commemorated in the myopathies which he described, as well as in his 1862 masterpiece, the Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, much consulted by Charles Darwin in the preparation of his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Duchenne's last major work (published in 1867) was a study of animal locomotion. He was never elected to the Academy of Sciences.