Like Beckham

This week the football player David Beckham was seen leaving the public hospital la Pitié Salpêtrière in the 13th arrondissement (link). He had been to a health check before announcing publicly that he would be playing for Paris Saint Germain for a period of 5 months. Today I passed the hospital on bicycle and decided to have a closer look.

The history of the place goes back 400 years to 1612 when Maria de Medicis (her again, I know) decided to create a hospice, Notre Dame de la Pitié, with the double goal of doing something for the poor and empty the streets of Paris of the many beggers. In 1656 Louis XIV decided to build a General Hospital on the site, and this became the beginning of la Pitié Salpêtrière we know today. 

A film in French on link gives a good overview of the history of the place and the buildings still standing whereas link outlines the historic events.  I decided to focus on the oldest part of the hospital, and more particularly I went on the hunt for a view I had seen on a photo in a book: a row of individual banks in front of a stone building. After a visit to the church which has the dimensions of Val de Grace (and is from the same period), a left turn into a small alley with identical houses built for the guardians, pushing my bike along a beautiful building that has recently been renovated called La Force, going through some arched passage ways, cycling along the rails leading to the neighbouring Gare d'Austerlitz, carrying up my bicycle some steep steps, I finally found three low buildings with the banks from my photo.

The buildings had been erected at a time when attitudes towards mentally ill people had become somewhat more human. The women who were locked up at la Pitié Salpêtrière were given individual rooms with a bank in front of each door so that they could get some fresh air, albeit perhaps still chained to the bank.

It was on the grounds of  la Pitié Salpêtrière that the famous doctor Jean Martin Charcot link did his research on neurology which led to his description of multiple sclerosis and ALS, among others, but his studies of hysteria are not to be forgotten either. Even Sigmund Freud came to study under Charcot!

I do hope that I will never have to enter the gates of this hospital for anything else but a leisurely walk amongst the old buildings or in the big park.