What it is
The Hôtel-Dieu stands on the west bank of the Rhône in the Bellecour quarter. Its first buildings are recorded in 1184, and it cared for the sick for more than eight centuries. Its long river front and dome are the work of the eighteenth century and the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot.
A second life
In 2007 the hospital's services were moved elsewhere; the building stood empty from 2010, and after major works it reopened in 2019 with a hotel, shops, restaurants and the Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie. The whole building has been a listed historic monument since 2011.
The old courtyards are open to walk through, and they are the reason to come.
A pilgrims' shelter by the bridge
Around the turn of the first millennium a brotherhood of Lyon townspeople set out to help pilgrims and travelers, and called on the Brothers of the Bridge, a religious order that built bridges and the hostels at their ends. The Lyon branch began the bridge over the Rhône, now the Pont de la Guillotière, and in 1184–1185 set up a house for pilgrims beside it, which became the hospital of the Rhône bridge, the ancestor of the Hôtel-Dieu. The first appointed physician, Master Martin Conras, was hired in 1454.
Faced with a growing population, the city bought the hospital in 1478 and rebuilt it much larger, with a main hall sixty-five meters long for up to two hundred patients and a chapel opening onto both the ward and the street. Nothing of that building survives. In the Renaissance the aldermen, among them Gadagne and Symphorien Champier, decided to build a great hospital on the site of today's chapel.
Rabelais, Richelieu and the Four Rows
In 1532 François Rabelais was appointed physician here, with about twenty nuns to care for the poor; he left suddenly in 1535, probably because of the Affair of the Placards. In 1622 the cramped buildings were replaced by wards laid out in a cross around a central dome, the Quatre-Rangs. The first stone of a new church, designed by Guillaume Ducellet, was laid on December 23, 1637, in the presence of Cardinal Alphonse-Louis du Plessis de Richelieu, Archbishop of Lyon. A building for convalescents went up on the Rhône quay from 1658 to 1663, and with beggars making up a tenth of the population after the wars of the late seventeenth century, Louis XIV allowed three lotteries to fund the care of soldiers.
Soufflot's monument to fever
Between 1741 and 1761 the long facade on the Rhône was built to plans by Jacques-Germain Soufflot, in rich white stone; Emperor Joseph II of Austria later called it a monument raised to fever. The great dome, begun in 1755 and finished in 1764, was meant to renew the air in the vast common wards. Statues of King Childebert I and Queen Ultrogotha by Pierre-Marie Prost stand at the main entrance, honoring the founders of Lyon's very first hospital in the sixth century. The hospital's reputation was excellent: between 1737 and 1748, one patient in four died at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, against one in fourteen in Lyon.
Siege, revival and a new life
The siege of Lyon in 1793 brought the hospital to ruin. It was bombarded from August 8 to October 9, and in the Terror that followed, eleven physicians, thirty-one surgeons and eight apothecaries were executed. In the nineteenth century it was enlarged again and held nearly a thousand patients, its physicians wearing red robes until 1866, and the head surgeon, in charge of four hundred surgical beds, had to stay unmarried and live in the hospital.
Nineteenth-century Lyon was a center of surgery. Joseph Gensoul performed the first resection of the upper jaw in 1827, Léopold Ollier created the first modern orthopedic surgery department here, and Mathieu Jaboulay, teacher of Alexis Carrel, attempted the first organ transplants. In February 1896, weeks after Röntgen's discovery of X-rays, Étienne Destot took Lyon's first radiographs and set up France's first radiology department in a disused shop of the hospital. In 1923 Léon Bérard opened France's second cancer center under the great dome.
In 2007 it was decided to move the hospital's services elsewhere so the building could be leased. It stood empty from 2010 to 2015, and after major works the spaces taken by an InterContinental hotel, shops and the Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie opened in June 2019. The whole building has been a classified historic monument since November 21, 2011.
The building had survived several threats. Between 1903 and 1909 the city, under Mayor Édouard Herriot, planned to close the hospital and demolish most of it, keeping only the river front, until the state protected it as a historic monument. On September 4, 1944, gunfire set the great dome alight and it was completely destroyed; funds to rebuild it were found only in the 1960s.
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