In a late eighteenth century Essay on the Physical and Medical Topography of Paris, Audin Rouvi re explained that Epilepsy, cold humours and paralysis are enough to gain entry to Bic tre, but no attempt is made to cure them with any remedy so a child of or admitted there for convulsions that were reputed to be of an epileptic nature caught among true epileptics an illness that he did not have, and in the long career that should lie before him on account of his youth, his only hope of a cure is the often imperfect efforts of Mother Nature.