Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
For most of the nineteenth century, French people associated hospitals with death and destitution. These institutions served as places where the poor went to die, not to be cured. As a result, hospitals (including maternity hospitals) were shelters of last resort for the poorest classes of society. Anyone who could avoid going to one of these institutions would shun them, at all possible costs. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, with the development of anesthesia and with the implementation of antiseptic and sterilization procedures, hospitals became safer places.