By 1788, there were 20,341 patients residing in forty-eight different hospitals around the city: an unprecedented number unmatched anywhere else in the world. A large percentage of these people would succumb to their infirmities. Because they were often poor, their bodies went unclaimed and fell into the hands of anatomists like Marie François Xavier Bichat, who reportedly carved up no fewer than six hundred bodies in the winter of 1801–1802.
