Hotel-Dieu de Paris

An ancient hospital on the Ile de la Cite beside Notre-Dame Cathedral, popularly said in later tradition to have been founded by Bishop Landry around AD 651, though the earliest solid documentary evidence dates only to 829, by which time it was already a dependency of the Notre-Dame cathedral chapter. For centuries it was the only hospital in Paris, funded in part by medieval royal grants such as a 1352 tax on seafood entering the city granted by King John the Good, and it was chronically overcrowded in later centuries, admitting some 6,000 patients in 1709 against a planned capacity of 2,000. It was rebuilt at its present site between 1867 and 1878 and remains an operating public hospital today, part of Assistance Publique - Hopitaux de Paris.