ABSTRACT
During the early modern period, Paris possessed the largest hospital for the treatment of the sick poor in France. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the institution remodelled its medieval wards, doubled in size and built new satellite hospitals to isolate victims of epidemic disease and to provide care for the incurable. Importantly, during the same period, the hospital for the first time created permanent paid positions for both physicians and surgeons. By the end of Louis XIV’s reign the Paris Hôtel Dieu had the largest medical staff in the kingdom and had transformed itself from an institution that provided food and shelter into one which provided the charitable services of physicians and surgeons to the sick poor.
