The Old people's home of Charity

It includes/understands 1000 beds but is not, to be strictly accurate, a hospital. It receives the poor old men, the disabled person and the incurable ones. For this reason, it comprises two infirmaries, of 26 and 35 Lits. In the event of acute disease, the patient is transported to the Hospital.
It also receives the children found, given up or orphan. There is there finally a section of Maternity where are confined the captive ones and poor women.
In first half of XVIIe century, misery is in Marseilles. " the streets, the churches were encumbered beggars, inconvenient and yelling, often hideous, who did all their efforts to move the sensitivity
public and vautraient themselves the night in the reference marks of gangsters ". Misery and insecurity reign on the city.
The Company of Blessed Sacrament will undertake to attack this problem, by saving the hearts, while relieving misery.
In 1638, Emmanuel Pachier, theological canon of the chapter of the Major, emulate of St-Vincent of Paul and member of the Company of St Sacrament will join together the money necessary and will create the alms house with the assistance of rich person traders and ship-owners of the city. It is about a charitable organization, destiny " to the poor little children, the old men and paralytic in indigence ".
The place is ideally chosen, place of the Observance, at the edge of the handle of Ourse, exposed well to the mistral which is the best remedy to drive out specific miasmas to this type of establishment.
In June 1641, it is a merry procession which accompanies the poor in their new residence. One finds there also the children given up, the old men at the end of the lifetime, poor, blind and incurable.
There are nurses for the children with milk. The vice-chancellors ensure the administration, undertaking to find an use of caulker or foam for the young boys, and to find husband with the girls by equipping them.
There will be a school in the enclosure of Charity, and the most gifted children will go to the Hospital to learn the surgery and the pharmacy: it is an authentic charitable organization.

In 1689, Louis XIV takes Charity under his protection and sets up it in General Hospital.
It is actually a question of containing the beggars who encumber the City. Gueux huntings run the city to catch them and lock up them in the general hospital where the mode became
quasi penitentiary. One is far from the spirit of the founders. The charitable organization became a place of enfermement where the discipline is hard.
With the Revolution, one declares that the begging should not exist any more, the name of Charity sounds badly and the old people's home will take for a few years the name of Old people's home of Old age and Childhood.
With Charity only the children and the incurable ones in a species of court of the miracles remain unhealthy and nauseous. To restore the discipline, one asks the Augustines sisters to come to reorganize the house and to deal with the " family ".
To increase
Old Charity about 1900
National library of France
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It will remain still a long time, in these rooms, of the poor families, then tramps will take the changing before his transformation into museum and showroom.

In 1857, the Minister of Interior Department, shocked by the deplorable situation of the old people's home, orders the transfer of this institution, in " the countryside ".
It is in Sainte Marguerite that the Administrative Commission of the old people's homes and hospitals finds a ground.
The first stone of the new Charity is posed on June 4, 1885.
The old people's home of the new Charity will really enter in service only in 1897, that is to say 12 years after the first stone.
In 1934, a first service of medicine will be opened, and it will have to be waited until 1945 so that the first service of surgery opens.
Oddly, it is only in 1958 that Sainte Marguerite loses her name of old people's home to become hospital.
The old people's home which one called new Charity became for all, the hospital Sainte Marguerite.