Pinel was the chief physician of the Salpêtrière by 1794, in charge of a 200-bed infirmary[4] which housed a tiny proportion of the huge indigent female population.

He was succeeded by his assistant Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840) who, from 1817, delivered the first systematic lectures on psychiatry in France and was the chief architect of the lunacy legislation of 30 June 1838.

Esquirol was followed by Étienne Pariset; and from 1831 till 1867 the chef d'hospice was Jean-Pierre Falret (1794–1870) who contributed much to our understanding of bipolar disorder and folie à deux.

Though he never held a senior appointment in the hospital, Duchenne nevertheless made meticulous observations on neurological patients, employing a wide range of innovative diagnostic techniques.

His name is commemorated in the myopathies which he described, as well as in his 1862 masterpiece, the Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, much consulted by Charles Darwin in the preparation of his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).

Public health physician and advocate of breastfeeding Truby King traveled from New Zealand to witness Charcot, reporting his clinical demonstrations seminal.

Numerous personalities have been treated at the Salpêtrière, including Michael Schumacher,[13] Ronaldo,[13] Prince Rainier of Monaco,[14] Alain Delon, Gérard Depardieu, and Valérie Trierweiler.

[16] Celebrities have also died at the Pitié-Salpêtrière, including the singer Josephine Baker in 1975, following a cerebral haemorrhage; philosopher Michel Foucault in 1984 due to AIDS-related complications; Diana, Princess of Wales following a car crash in 1997;[17] and French bicycle racer Laurent Fignon in 2010, from the metastatic spread of lung cancer (which coincidentally happened exactly thirteen years after Diana’s death in the same hospital).

In the place in front of the main entrance to the hospital, there is a large bronze monument to Philippe Pinel, who was chief physician of the Hospice from 1795 to his death in 1826.

The Salpêtrière was, at the time, like a large village, with seven thousand elderly indigent and ailing women, an entrenched bureaucracy, a teeming market and huge infirmaries.