 During the 1780s and into the early Revolution, Condorcet would devote himself increasingly to “le bien public” [the public good]. For example, he addressed the subject of healthcare, with the hope of ending a system long associated with indigence and Christian charity. In his 1786 Memoire sur les hôpitaux [Memoir on Hospitals], he suggested closing down the thousand-year old municipal hospital of the city of Paris, the Hôtel-Dieu, and replacing it with a secular, locally-based, municipal health-delivery system composed of small neighborhood hospices. He was also not averse to changing his earlier formulated positions. In 1793, for example, he reversed his argument put forward in 1788 against progressive taxation, in favor of the same (see Greenbaum 1984 and Perkins 1984).