Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oshinsky’s book, both comprehensive and concise, is in good part drawn from archival material, some not previously available, and oral history, which plays a large role, elicited from dozens of current NYU/Bellevue staffers as well as former medical students, residents, and faculty. Some consider Bellevue to be the first hospital in North American: first, rising from a small infirmary built in the 1660s, when the Dutch ruled Manhattan, then morphing under British control in 1736 into a two-story structure which housed the sick, the insane, and prisoners. The ever-changing New York City is reflected in its own expansive medical center. This storied institution boasts more than a hundred languages that are translated with doctors communicating on dual telephones through an interpreter trained in regional dialects. Poets and novelists have memorialized Bellevue in their work, and at least one (Norman Mailer) was committed there for a time. It has also made more than one cameo appearance in movies. The hospital garnered great praise during the Civil War for treating thousands of Union soldiers. By the 1900s it held 2,000 beds, a nursing school, the city morgue, a massive psychiatric pavilion, a special prison ward, top-flight laboratories, and a medical staff provided by the three best medical colleges in New York. The hospital has remained a buttress against crises--AIDS, Ebola, its heroic evacuation during Super-storm Sandy, to name only a few. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a riveting history of New York's iconic public hospital that charts the turbulent rise of American medicine. Bellevue Hospital, on New York City's East Side, occupies a colorful and horrifying place in the public imagination: a den of mangled crime victims, vicious psychopaths, assorted derelicts, lunatics, and exotic-disease sufferers. In its two and a half centuries of service, there was hardly an epidemic or social catastrophe—or groundbreaking scientific advance—that did not touch Bellevue. David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution. From its origins in 1738 as an almshouse and pesthouse, Bellevue today is a revered public hospital bringing first-class care to anyone in need. With its diverse, ailing, and unprotesting patient population, the hospital was a natural laboratory for the nation's first clinical research. It treated tens of thousands of Civil War soldiers, launched the first civilian ambulance corps and the first nursing school for women, pioneered medical photography and psychiatric treatment, and spurred New York City to establish the country's first official Board of Health. As medical technology advanced, "voluntary" hospitals began to seek out patients willing to pay for their care. For charity cases, it was left to Bellevue to fill the void. The latter decades of the twentieth century brought rampant crime, drug addiction, and homelessness to the nation's struggling cities—problems that called a public hospital's very survival into question. It took the AIDS crisis to cement Bellevue's enduring place as New York's ultimate safety net, the iconic hospital of last resort. Lively, page-turning, fascinating, Bellevue is essential American history.
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