L'hôpital / Robert de Balsac ; translated into English by M. Pijoan.

  • Robert de Balsac
Date:
[1933]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: L'hôpital / Robert de Balsac ; translated into English by M. Pijoan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Châtillon de Lyons, le grand variet du Roy Charles VIII) who, as a relative of Monseigneur Robert, lived in Lyons. Champier, who paced the floors of the Hôtel Dieu, no doubt saw in the manuscript the inherent ‘Geist’ of many of his patients. The translator in the twentieth century has tried with his too feeble pen to catch the spirit of the original document. ‘The Course by which a Hospital functions, that is, those People of whom it admits, those in particular who reach this Institution in the main by their own Doings. These Persons who enter the Hospital, Their Types, Natures and Deeds, and who finally escape Malice, Misery and Injustice by casting themselves into this Refuge.n There are people who have little in the way of means, but spend a lot. There are people who play voluntarily at games, but lose a lot. There are those people who have rather moderate means, but spend lavishly and buy costly and expensive things. There are also those poor soldiers who have sadly not acquired anything in their youth and are agreeable but have spent all. There are finally, too, those distorted owls who spend simply without order or reason. There are those lazy ones who in their youth thought themselves working, but were only dreaming. In our hospital, too, and in our society at large, as the hospital is a section of society, there are merchants who buy and sell, both at bargains and at credits. There are those, too, who would like to revenge themselves on everything which is done to them, seeing only evil in things favorable as well as unfavorable. There are those slipshod cafards too, who have the singular faculty of spending the money of others, and who, moreover, have the tremendous fault of not spending it on the proper things, either by their imbecility or by their distinct laziness. There are, moreover, people who are en¬ tirely governed by the counsel of fools and of malicious beings and even leave their entire affairs in their charge. There are those dunderheads who do no good essentially, but who entertain others, their fancies and their relatives, in a grand state. There exist old dried drums of people and town criers. These poor fellows did not work with industry in their youth and as a consequence, in their old age, take abode in the hospital. There are those people who serve their masters and live entirely at