n. an institution founded in Paris in 1656 as an asylum for the infirm, aged, and insane. At one time, it contained nearly 10,000 people, and treatment was proverbially brutal. The Salpêtrière was transformed during the regime of Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), who became its director in 1794 and introduced many pioneering reforms in the treatment of people with mental illnesses. From the 1860s, the hospital became the center for the psychopathological investigations of Jean-Martin Charcot, which involved the use of hypnosis; in 1885, one of Charcot’s students was the young Sigmund Freud.