[From children in hospitals to children's hospitals: a tentative analysis of the development of specific arrangements for the medical care of children at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries].

Through several concrete examples coming from the accounts of old hospitals and from the founding deeds of the first institutions especially denoted to children, we shall try to define the elements of a spiritual and mental evolution in the reflector on destitute sick children, and its being materialized by the foundation of the very first "hospitals" specialized in welcoming them.