Scene · 1880s-1890s; 1916
Former Hôpital de la Charité
Address · Angle du boulevard Saint-Germain et de la rue des Saints-Pères (45, rue des Saints-Pères), 75006 Paris
Metro · Saint-Germain-des-Prés (4) / Saint-Sulpice (4)
Today · Gone. Hospital demolished in the 1930s; the site is occupied by the Saints-Pères medical faculty.
The story
The Hôpital de la Charité, founded in the 17th century by the Brothers of Saint John of God, stretched along rue des Saints-Pères, at the corner of the future boulevard Saint-Germain. A renowned teaching hospital, it was home to great clinicians. It was demolished in the 1930s and replaced by the buildings of the Saints-Pères medical faculty. Medical students attended lessons and ward rounds there, and several departments took an interest in nervous diseases. Research on hypnosis and suggestion then drew many curious onlookers.
Churton reports that Papus, then a non-resident student in the department of Dr. Jules Luys, an ardent explorer of hypnosis and suggestion, once took the writer Anatole France to watch some experiments. He hoped to draw him toward occultism; Michelet thought this hope futile, France remaining in his eyes a brilliant dilettante. In 1891 Luys, along with Flammarion and others, signed an honorary diploma presented to Papus. Papus, who defended his medical thesis in 1894, was thus keen to give his research scientific credibility.
Papus, called up as a doctor during the First World War, died of tuberculosis at the Charité on 25 October 1916, according to his biographers. The present building, in a 1930s-1950s style, retains nothing of the old hospital. The corner of the two streets remains a landmark for recalling the link between medicine, hypnosis and occultism at the end of the 19th century. Today visitors pass a university facade. No plaque recalls the old hospital or Papus's time there.
To be checked · Papus's death at the Charité comes from standard biographies, not from Churton's book. Coordinates placed at the corner of the two streets.