Necker Hospital

Hôpital Necker – Enfants Malades
Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris
Geography
Location	149, rue de Sèvres, Paris 15, France
Organisation
Care system	Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris
Hospital type	Teaching
Affiliated university	University of Paris
Services
Emergency department	Yes.
Beds	600
Speciality	Children's hospital
History
Founded	1778
Links
Website	http://www.hopital-necker.aphp.fr

The Hôpital Necker – Enfants Malades (French: [opital nɛkɛʁ ɑ̃fɑ̃ malad], Necker Hospital – Sick Children) is a French teaching hospital in central Paris. It is a hospital of the Assistance publique – Hôpitaux de Paris group and is affiliated to the University of Paris Descartes. It was the first paediatric hospital in the world.

The Necker Hospital was founded in 1778 by Madame Necker, born Suzanne Curchod, mother of Madame de Stael and wife of Jacques Necker, minister of Louis XVI. Jacques Necker was a leader in the movement to reform crowded hospitals by building smaller treatment centers closer to the patients' neighborhoods. Madame Necker subsequently remodeled an old monastery into the hospital, which prior to the French Revolution was known as the Hospice de Charité. It was a Catholic institution where a baptism certificate and a confession were requirements for admission. Many poor parishoners would come to the hospital for their last rites before death. Hospitals at the time were seen as "gates to heaven" which were run by the Catholic Sisters of Charity, rather than the scientific institutions run by doctors they would later become. Male and female patients were kept separate from each other, as many hospitals of the time did. Triage procedures, established all over Paris in 1802, systematically excluded pregnant women, the mentally ill, and venereal patients. Patients were divided into four categories: fever, malignant fever, surgical, and convalescent.

The Hôpital des Enfants Malades (Hospital for Sick Children), not to be confused with the foundling hospital, the Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés, was created by the Conseil général des Hospices (General Hospices Council) in January 1801 to help manage the health and social structures of Paris. With the aim of reorganising the hospital, the Council proposed a new classification based on the common distinction between hospitals and special hospitals and announced the creation of a hospital "for the children of both sexes under the age of fifteen years" (4 December 1801). The newly formed Hôpital des Enfants Malades opened in June 1802 on the site of the previous orphanage hospital Hôpital de l'Enfant Jésus ("Baby Jesus hospital"). It was the first paediatric hospital in the Western world.

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