Bead

XII — XVI Century

At the end of the 12th century, the bishop of Winchester, acting English diplomatic representative in France, acquired lands called Grange aux Queux . In 1204, he built a castle on them, which he named "Winchester" in honor of his diocese. Thus, “Bicetre” is the original English name, distorted in French, Winchester , later converted to Wincestre and, finally, Bichestre , Bissêtre, Bicetre ^[1] .

In 1294, the castle was confiscated by the enemy of the British Philip the Beautiful . For a long time, the castle passed from hand to hand, changing owners, and in the end was destroyed during the Hundred Years War , turning into a hangout of thieves and beggars ^[2] . Finally, the Duke of Berry acquired the ruins and rebuilt a new, luxurious and richly decorated castle. However, in 1411, the duke was accused of conspiracy, and his castle was burned. By the sixteenth century, Bisetra again turned into a haven for robbers and other marginalized people. Criminal elements began to settle in its ruins and environs, the place was considered damned and unfavorable ^[3] .

XVII — XVIII centuries

In 1632 - 1633, Louis XIII brought Bisetre into relative order and set up a hospital for military invalids in it, and soon he joined an educational home for orphans. In 1656 , under Louis XIV , Bisetre became part of the so-called General Hospital ( L'Hôpital général de Paris ) ^[4] . This institution was tasked with discouraging "poverty and idleness as the source of all kinds of unrest." Michel Foucault believed that the General Hospital, directly subordinate to the king and not subject to the church, was not actually a medical institution, and the creation of this structure was the beginning of the pan-European process of isolation of “extra people” ( marginalized , poor, crazy, etc.), which he calls "Great conclusion" ( Fr. Le grand renfermement ) ^[5] . Due to the lack of medical care, which amounted to a mandatory round-trip only twice a week, the General Hospital was almost no different from a simple prison. According to Foucault, “the independence and omnipotence of the General Hospital is almost absolute, its court is not subject to appeal, and the decisions are higher than any law; it’s some kind of strange power created by the king on the verge of law, at the junction between the rule of law and justice, some third repressive force ” ^[5] .

To save money, Bisetr simultaneously served as an almshouse , insane asylum and state prison ^[6] . In the first year, up to 600 people recruited in the almshouse: old people over 70 years of age, invalids, terminally ill patients, paralytics , epileptics , people with mental retardation , scabies and patients with sexually transmitted diseases , orphans who were not separated by gender or age. Their conditions were terrible: they lay in unheated rooms of 8-13 people in one bed made of straw. The staff in Bisetra was not enough. So, for 800 people there were 83 ministers (one specifically for the destruction of lice) and 14 carers. Venereal patients were in the worst position, who were humiliated, beaten and tortured. In 1737, the inhabitants of Bisetra were divided into five “services”: in the first there were a straitjacket, dungeons, prison cells and loners for those who were detained by secret royal order; the second and third services were intended for the "good poor", as well as for "adult and juvenile paralysis"; in the fourth there are lunatics and madmen; in the fifth service, people with sexually transmitted diseases, convalescent children, and children born in a correctional home lived together ^[5] .

In order to provide the inhabitants of Bisetra with water, they began to build, according to the project of the architect Germain Beaufran , a deep well, during the construction of which the labor of prisoners was used. However, even after revealing the practical unsuitability of this well and the difficulties in its maintenance, construction was continued to ensure the employment of persons forcibly in Bisetra. As early as 1788, water was raised from it with the help of 12 horses, but later, for this economic work, they began to use the labor of “strong and strong prisoners” ^[7] .

The prisoners were kept in extremely harsh conditions. A camera measuring 12 by 10 meters could accommodate up to 70 people ^[8] . In addition, in Bisetra there were so-called “black” punishment cells, located at a depth of five meters underground, where neither fresh air nor light penetrated. There were also punishment cells with a small window - “white”. Both those and other criminals were chained to the wall with chains ^[9] .

By a decree of September 16, 1760 in Paris, every mentally ill person had to go through the Hotel Dieu hospital , where two wards were allocated for this. If after several weeks there was no improvement, the patients were declared incurable, and then they were transferred to the so-called “Small houses” ( French Petites maisons, later Hospice du menage ) or to Bisetre (men) and Salpetriere (women) ^[10] . For his bad reputation, Bisetre even gained fame as a "Bastille for rabble." The French writer Louis-Sebastian Mercier, in his book " Pictures of Paris " (first edition in 1781), condemned the illegal shopping practice in Bicetre and Salpetriere by students studying surgery in order to conduct anatomical autopsies ^[11] . In the utopian novel “Year 2440,” Mercier pointed to the terrible conditions of detention in Bisetra of persons in the second half of the 18th century ^[12] :

In 1780, an epidemic of a disease spread in Paris; rumors claimed that it owed its origin to the unsatisfactory sanitary condition of the General Hospital facilities. In Paris, even the widespread opinion that it would be nice to burn Bisetra and save the city from this "abscess". In order to stop rumors and reassure the population, a commission was appointed to Bisetr, which included several doctors - managers of other hospitals, the dean of the theological faculty and a doctor at the General Hospital. The commission recognized that “putrefactive fever” caused by air quality was rampant in Bisetra. The commission’s report stated that the reason should be considered bad weather, due to which the disease became epidemic in the capital; the symptoms observed at the General Hospital “are consistent with the nature of the time of year and exactly coincide with the diseases that have been observed in Paris since that time,” and “rumors began to spread of a contagious disease in Bisetra that could spread to the whole capital are baseless. ” However, apparently, the panic rumors after this report did not completely stop, since after a while the doctor of the General Hospital made another report, repeating basically the same arguments.

Back in 1781, Necker decreed the need for extensive hospital reforms. In 1791, the Duke of Laroshfuko-Liancourt , who in the Constituent Assembly acted as the defender of places of public charity, presented a report on the unsatisfactory condition of these institutions ^[10] :

Also in Bisetra, as, for example, in Bedlam in London, back in the late 18th century, the medieval practice of showing visitors to mentally ill people for money continued. This custom, according to M. Foucault, in Paris and London has become "almost a social institution." So, the townspeople from the left bank of the Seine right up to the Revolution made an entertaining walk on Sundays to Bisetre to watch the crazy people. Mirabeau wrote that the insane in Bisetra were paraded, “ like strange animals, for the fun of the first villager who agreed to pay the liard .” Some jailers were famous for their ability to make mad people do a lot of dance steps and acrobatic tricks, for which they used a whip for patients.

Late 18th — 19th Century

In April 1792, according to some sources - in Bisetra, according to others - in Salpetriere, experiments were performed on corpses delivered from the hospital directorate to cut off the head with a guillotine for its subsequent use in executions ^{[13] [14]} . If you believe the apocryphal memoirs of Clément Henri Sanson , dedicated to the life of his grandfather - the famous French state executioner Charles-Henri Sanson (Great Sanson) - these experiments took place on April 17, 1792 in the courtyard of Bisetra in the presence of doctors: Antoine Louis , Philippe Pinel and Cabanis . Based on the experiments, the preference was given to an indirectly truncated (oblique) blade, which was later used during executions by guillotining ^[15] .

Since the end of the 17th century, Bisetra had been mentally ill, whose mortality was extremely high due to poor conditions and lack of proper treatment. The law of 1790 provided for the construction of large hospitals designed specifically for the maintenance of the insane, but by 1793 not one of them was founded (mainly for economic reasons). The bisetre was considered the "House for the Poor"; here, as before the revolution, they were kept together by the poor, the elderly, criminals and lunatics, as well as political prisoners. According to rumors, in Bisetra, as in some other medical institutions and prisons, opponents of the revolutionary regime took refuge (nobles, emigrants, royalists, un sworn clergymen , agents of foreign states, counterfeiters, etc.). During the so-called September massacres (mass killings of prisoners by a revolutionary mob), which occurred on September 2-5, 1792 in Paris, Bisetr also suffered. A crowd of 200 people, led by François Henriot (he was previously imprisoned in Bicetra, and later became commander of the National Guard of Paris) on September 4 killed the inhabitants of Bisetra, using guns ^[16] . Lamartine wrote in his History of the Girondins (1847) about the massacres carried out by the crowd in Bisetra ^[17] :

Georges Couton , one of the leaders of the Jacobins , wrote about this: “ I just found out that Bisetre, who resisted part of the night, is now taken and that the people legally exercise their supreme power there ” ^[18] .

An important place in the history of the development of Bisetra and psychiatry as a whole is occupied by the activities of Philippe Pinel , aimed at reorganizing the regime of detention and treatment of mentally ill patients and turning the place of detention and isolation into a medical institution proper. His non-violent approach to caring for the mentally ill is called "moral treatment"; despite the fact that limited attempts to “free" the mentally ill were made earlier, in the history of psychiatry these reforms are steadily associated precisely with the activities of Pinel, which he began in Bisetra. As a result of attempts to put into practice the law of 1790, they sent to Bisetre insane persons freed from strait houses, and a little later, from Hotel Dieu. According to M. Foucault, taking into account the fact that for the first time in the history of the General Hospital, a person who was already known due to his research in the field of mental illness was assigned to the Bisetra clinic, this very appointment is proof that the presence of the insane in Bisetra has already turned into a purely medical problem. On August 25, 1793, Pinel was appointed to the post of chief physician Bisetra, after which he obtained, despite Cooton’s opposition, permission to remove the chains from the mentally ill and introduced the practice of hospital treatment, medical detours, medical procedures, occupational therapy , and the selection of appropriate personnel. These reforms were carried out in several stages. At the first time, Pinel faced difficulties, because, despite the support of the Hospital Commission and its chairman Kabanis, rumors of innovations in Bisetra aroused suspicions in the authorities of the political unreliability of these events ^[19] . So, Couton, calling Pinel, allegedly declared to him: “Citizen, I will come to visit you in Bisetra, and woe to you, if you deceive us, and the enemies of the people are hidden between your madmen.” The next day, the paralytic Couton was taken to Bisetr, where he did not find any obvious violations. Leaving the hospital, he said to Pinel: “You yourself are probably crazy if you are going to unload these animals. Do whatever you want with them, but I'm afraid that you will be the first victim of your own folly. ” According to legend, immediately after the departure of Couton Pinel freed several dozen patients from chains.

He described the subsequent release of patients from the shackles in Bisetra in his diary and in his Treatise on Mental Illness as follows:

On May 13, 1795 , after Pinel was appointed senior doctor at the Salpetriere Hospital , he carried out reforms similar to those in Bicetre. According to the famous Russian psychiatrist N. N. Bazhenov , Pinel’s merit was that he “elevated the madman to the rank of patient”. According to the psychiatrist Yu. S. Savenko , psychiatry took place as a science and scientific practice only after Pinel’s reform - after removal from sick chains and elimination of the police rank as head of the hospital ^[20] . It should be noted that Pinel and his followers used various restrictive measures in clinical practice, and first of all a straitjacket , the invention of which is attributed to the upholsterer (furniture maker) Bisetra - Guilleret. Given this, Foucault, in his lecture course “ Psychiatric Power ”, notes that Pinel’s reforms were only a transition to more sophisticated methods of governance: from a dominant attitude of domination to an imperious attitude of discipline ^[21] .

The French psychiatrist Felix Voisin ( Félix Voisin , 1794–1872), who was in charge of the department for epileptics and idiots in Bicetra, dealt with, among other things, the treatment of idiotic children. In the words of Yu. V. Cannabih , “What Pinel did for the mentally ill, Voisin tried to do for idiotic children: raise these destitute creatures, make them look at them as people, not wordless animals.” However, the third department of the mentally ill in Bisetra included as early as 1852 a mixture of adults and children affected by epilepsy and idiocy.

In the 19th century, Bisetre was still used as a prison for criminals sentenced to death or sentenced to galleys. He played the role of a transit prison, where convicted criminals were waiting for their sentence to hard labor in French Guiana (the “dry guillotine”). In 1836 the prison was closed; in 1850, the buildings were built and reconstructed ^[6] . In 1881, the prison ceased to exist, and Bisetr finally turned into a psychiatric medical institution. It contained both peaceful and violent patients; there was a department for children; in addition, among the patients of Bisetra there were epileptics and people of advanced age ^[22] .

In the second half of the 19th century, Paul Broca served in Bisetra, who, as a result of his observations of hospital patients and previous studies, discovered a center of speech in the human brain named after him - Brock's center (the core of the motor analyzer of speech articulation), and Broca's aphasia (speech disorder ( aphasia ) caused by damage to the motor speech center).

In the second half of the 19th century, Dr. Paul Gachet served in Bisetra and Salpetriere after graduating from the medical faculty. There he gained clinical experience in psychiatry and defended his dissertation on the theme “Research on Melancholy”. Gachet entered the history of culture as a friend of many impressionists and the last attending physician Vincent van Gogh ^[23] .

XX — XXI centuries

In 1950, a large-scale modernization of Bisetra was undertaken. In 1952, a children's hospital opened with him; in 1957, the first department of pediatric cardiology appeared in France ^[22] .

Currently, the complex houses the wide profile, providing a diverse range of medical services ^[24] . A number of buildings, including those of the 17th and 18th centuries that have the status of protected ^[6] , have been preserved from the historical building.

• Bisetre was the last place of imprisonment (1777–1784) by the adventurer Jean-Henri Latudot , who spent without a court decision in custody under the Old regime (in the Bastille , Vincennes Castle , Charenton ^[25] ) for a total of 35 years and committed several escapes. In the era of the Revolution, he became famous as “the victim of the royal regime” and “the most famous prisoner of France and the Bastille” ^{[26] [27]} . The author of the translated into Russian memoirs entitled "In the Grip of the Bastille", a valuable source of information about the French prison life of that time. In them he wrote that, despite being in the Bastille and Vincennes, he still trembles at the word “Bisetre”, and described the prison as follows: “ With the help of imagination, you can certainly imagine how terribly, cruelly and inhumane they were treated Bisetra with prisoners, but reality is worse than any fantasy ” ^[28] .
• In 1803, the Marquis de Sade was in the hospital for some time before being transferred to a mental hospital in Charenton , where he died ^[8] .
• В Бисетре дважды содержался Видок перед дальнейшим отправлением на каторгу ^[8] , о чём он писал в «Записках Видока, начальника Парижской тайной полиции».
• В 1804 году после своего ареста в Париже при организации покушения на Наполеона Бонапарта в Бисетре содержался вождь шуанов Жорж Кадудаль , который был казнён 25 июня 1804 года на площади Отель-де-Виль (бывшая Гревская площадь).
• В 1891 году в Бисетре несколько месяцев находился поэт-символист Жермен Нуво , соученик по коллежу Поля Сезанна и близкий друг Артюра Рембо и Поля Верлена . Луи Арагон считал его крупным поэтом, не уступающим по таланту Рембо, а Андре Бретон включил его в свою «Антологию чёрного юмора » (1939).

• « Год две тысячи четыреста сороковой: Сон которого, возможно, и не было » — роман Луи-Себастьяна Мерсье , действие которого происходит в будущем, где Бисетра, этого «смирительного дома, где содержатся умалишенные, а лучше было бы сказать — сводимые с ума» (как и Сальпетриера) — уже не существует ^[12] .
• « Последний день приговорённого к смерти » — повесть Виктора Гюго . Автор дневника после суда, решением которого он приговорён к смерти на гильотине, содержится в тюрьме Бисетра до его перевода в тюрьму Консьержери непосредственно для проведения казни на Гревской площади (« Мне осталось всего три этапа: Бисетр, Консьержери, Гревская площадь »). В повести приводится описание тюрьмы, заковывание в кандалы заключённых с целью их отправки в Тулон на галеры, нахождение в лазарете. Покидая тюрьму, герой замечает надпись над главными воротами Бисетра — «Убежище для престарелых» — и замечает про себя: « Вот как, — подумал я, — оказывается, тут люди доживают до старости ». При написании повести Гюго с друзьями посетил тюрьму. Также Бисетр упоминается и в других произведениях писателя (« Отверженные », « Девяносто третий год »).
• « Полковник Шабер » — повесть Оноре де Бальзака . Главный герой повести Гиацинт Шабер, бывший наполеоновский офицер, вынужден доживать свою старость в полной нищете в Бисетре. В «Кодексе порядочных людей», к которому приложил руку Бальзак, история Бисетра иронически резюмируется следующим образом: « При Карле VI поселился во Франции некий кардинал Винчестерский, который выстроил неподалеку от Парижа великолепный замок. Вы не понимаете, что общего у английского кардинала и мошенников? Мы вам объясним: в конце концов они украли у него замок и превратили его в свое загородное поместье; в результате Бисетр (искаженный Винчестер) сделался притоном, где до сих пор преспокойно обитают четыре тысячи оборванцев ».
• «Король Бисетра. Век XVI. Рауль Спифам » — «новелла-хроника» Жерара де Нерваля . В новелле Рауль Спифам, реально существовавший адвокат и теоретик-реформатор, сошёл с ума, возомнив себя королём Генрихом II , и был помещён по настоянию своих родственников в Бисетр, откуда сумел сбежать с целью поведать народу о своём заточении. Генрих II после прекращения волнений не отсылает Спифама обратно в Бисетр, а поселяет его под охраной в загородном доме.
• « Парижские тайны » (1842—1843) — роман Эжена Сю , в котором автор описывает Бисетр во всех современных ему качествах — богадельня для престарелых, тюрьма с камерами смертников, психиатрическая лечебница (имеется ферма, где применяется труд больных) с отделением для неизлечимо больных:

• «Колокола Бисетра» (фр. Les anneaux de Bicêtre, 1962 ) — роман Жоржа Сименона . В психологическом романе Сименона действие в основном происходит в больничной палате Бисетра, где главный редактор влиятельной газеты Рене Могра поправляется после инсульта, прикованный к постели односторонним параличом. Одним из лечащих врачей является главный врач больницы. Продолжительная болезнь заставляет Могра вспомнить свою прошлую жизнь и пересмотреть отношение к прошлому, своим близким, друзьям и сослуживцам — « Пусть он не нашёл ответов, зато задавал себе вопросы, возможно, даже слишком много вопросов, которые теперь будут жить у него внутри ». В предисловии романа писатель специально оговаривает, что, хотя ему лично доводилось посещать Бисетр, он « не встречал там ни одного из людей, описанных в этой книге ». При подготовке к написанию романа Сименон заходил в Бисетр, чтобы навести справки по интересующим его вопросам ^[29] .

• Каннабих Ю. В. История психиатрии. — Ленинград: Государственное медицинское издательство, 1928.
• Мильчина В. А . Париж в 1814—1848 годах. Повседневная жизнь. — М.: Новое литературное обозрение, 2013. — 944 с. — (Культура повседневности).
• Латюд, Жан-Анри Мазер де. В тисках Бастилии. Пер. with fr. А. Н. Горлина. — М. : Красная газета , 1929. — С. 134
• Фуко М . Рождение клиники. — М.: Академический проект (Психологические технологии), 2010. — 256 с.
• Фуко М. История безумия в классическую эпоху. — СПб.: Университетская книга, 1997. — 576 с.
• Фуко М. Психиатрическая власть: Курс лекций, прочитанный в Коллеж де Франс в 1973—1974 уч. году / Пер. with fr. А. Шестакова. - SPb. : Наука , 2007. — 450 с. — ISBN 978-5-02-026920-0 .
• Patrice Bourée, Alireza Ensaf. L'hôpital de Bicêtre. Du château au CHU (фр.) // La revue du praticien. — 2010. — Vol. 60 . — P. 1325—1329 .

• Madeleine Leveau-Fernandez. De la Grange-aux-Queulx à Bicêtre: sept siècles d'histoire (Fr.) . Société d'histoire de Gentilly. Date of treatment January 14, 2019.
• Bicêtre, une histoire de l'hôpital (fr.) . Assistance hôpitaux publique de Paris. Date of treatment January 14, 2019.