Writers took to describing the rapid urbanization in terms of disease. The smog-engulfed metropolis became a festering sore, oozing sewage into the rivers, sulfurizing the air and breeding bacteria as residents piled on top of each other in apartment complexes. A fear of contagions bred citywide panic, and soon panic itself became a disease. As medical schools began to introduce a condition known as hysteria, thought to be caused by the uterus, more than five thousand mentally ill, epileptic, poor or otherwise incurable women in Paris were banished to the Salpêtrière, a former gunpowder factory turned hospital next door to the Jardin des Plantes. Some would have called it a death factory. “Behind those walls, a particular population lives, swarms, and drags itself around: old people, poor women, reposantes awaiting death on a bench, lunatics howling their fury or weeping their sorrow in the insanity ward or the solitude of the cells . . . It is the Versailles of pain,” wrote the journalist Jules Claretie.
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