The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France

Drawing on a wide variety of archival and secondary sources, The Charitable Imperative, originally published in 1989, provides an overview of the very different institutions that treated the poor in France from the seventeenth through to the early nineteenth centuries: hospitals and poorhouses, military infirmaries, reformatories for prostitutes, holding places for the insane, and so on. It recovers much of the daily realities of the institutions for those who lived in or passed through the...