I stood in what I thought was a large, empty square that was relatively clean and an ideal place to take pictures of the façade of Notre Dame de Paris. Little did I know that the place where I was carelessly snapping photos had once been a breeding ground for disease. It was a place of sickness and death. This was the original location of the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. Hôtel-Dieu was a hospital built in the seventh century. By the twelfth century during the reconstruction of Notre Dame, the hospital had grown to accommodate 1,000 patients, which I thought was quite impressive until I discovered that the hospital only had 500 beds. Only patients who were rich enough or ill enough had their own bed. In many cases, there were four patients crammed into a single cot. To make matters worse, I was horrified to hear that patients were not separated based on their symptoms but instead by the severity of their sickness. In the given conditions, this approach helped various illnesses spread through the hospital population, making many patients in Hôtel-Dieu even sicker than when they first were admitted. These horrible conditions persisted until the second Empire when Napoleon III and Haussmann tore down the Hôtel-Dieu, leaving the square where I was taking photos. A new Hôtel-Dieu was built on one side of the square, and this still serves as a hospital in Paris. (-Lauren)