Bellevue

September 5, 2016
Oshinsky, professor of history at NYU and Pulitzer-winner for Polio: An American Story, positions Bellevue as “a microcosm of the city it serves,” tracing its development from its hazy 17th-century origins as a Dutch infirmary to its emergence as a 21st-century cultural fixture. Bellevue’s mission of providing free care to the destitute means every epidemic and wave of immigration to reach New York Harbor has passed through its doors. Oshinsky attempts to place Bellevue in dual context, plying medical and socioeconomic history. He struggles with the physicality and aura of this massive institution, which in 1816 added “an orphanage, a morgue, a pest house, a prison, and a lunatic asylum” to its almshouse and infirmary. By the 1950s it had expanded to include 84 wards over five city blocks. Its medical and psychiatric practices have been vehemently criticized, and its political battles have been ruthless. As a result, the chapters overflow with background and sometimes read like scrambled-together lectures. Oshinsky often shortchanges his fascinating subject while discoursing into fascinating, if tangential, asides. When he stays on task, he focuses on a handful of elite physicians—William Hammond, Stephen Smith, Edith Lincoln, Saul Farber—while the bulk of Bellevue’s lifeblood goes unchronicled. Despite Bellevue’s rich history, the narrative doesn’t truly cohere.

September 15, 2016
An eye-opening history of the Manhattan hospital whose name is a byword for asylums everywhere.If a person is taken to Bellevue, it's never for good reasons. It is the hospital where sick homeless people, injured construction workers, and wounded cops and robbers come, scooped up from all over Manhattan, with elite wards for the elite and less-than-elite wards for the rest. In that sense, writes Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Oshinsky (History/New York Univ., and Medical Humanities/NYU School of Medicine; Polio: An American Story, 2010, etc.), "Bellevue is a microcosm of the city it serves." It has made news for generations, in recent years for housing John Lennon's assassin but also for having been the death place for Stephen Foster, O. Henry, and Lead Belly. That familiarity in the popular culture, notes the author, comes at a price, for though Bellevue has an ineradicable reputation, it is the definitive public hospital, treating rich and poor, attending to every conceivable malady, its doctors researching epidemics, ushering in public health reforms, and dispensing wisdom ("Work and keep out of the easy chair....Don't eat too much meat"). From the ER to the Insane Pavilion ("Imagines Himself a Mosquito--Now an Inmate at Bellevue," reads one headline of yore), Oshinsky's account focuses on people. Anecdotal, its learning lightly worn, it makes a fine complement to the medical writing of Atul Gawande and Richard Selzer. It is also full of discoveries. For instance, it should come as no comfort to anyone that electroshock therapy, in which Bellevue was a pioneer, had its origins in the electrical stun guns used to stun pigs before they were slaughtered; it looks humane, Oshinsky suggests, only against other "therapies" such as lobotomy, and it was applied to thousands of patients, "many of them children." A lively contribution to popular histories of New York and its institutions, worthy of shelving alongside Robert Caro's The Power Broker and Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace's Gotham.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2016

"It gathers the dead and dying from the rivers and streets and is kept busy night and day with the misery of the living." That early New York Times description of the city's Bellevue Hospital encapsulates its history and current incarnation, in the view of Oshinsky (history, New York Univ.; Polio: An American Story). From its 1736 beginnings as an almshouse with a one-room infirmary to the current 25-story, 1,200-bed version, where more than 600,000 patients are seen annually through emergency rooms and outpatient clinics, Bellevue has always served the underserved. As the largest public hospital in the nation's largest city, it has been at the forefront of dealing with such crises as yellow fever, cholera, smallpox, Civil War wounded, the Spanish flu, AIDS, 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, and the Ebola virus. Oshinsky places his story squarely in the history of American medicine and public health as well as of Bellevue itself. He takes numerous side trips into the personalities who have passed through, and the political and economic forces that have come to bear on the institution. VERDICT This readable, smoothly flowing, and well-documented account should fascinate readers with interests touching on all aspects of the history of medicine and the American health-care system.--Richard Maxwell, Porter Adventist Hosp. Lib., Denver

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2016
In his impressive biography of Bellevue Hospital, historian Oshinsky (Polio: An American Story, 2005) writes about much more than a building. He splendidly captures the essence of a nearly 300-year-old institution and its resolute commitment to serving those in need (especially immigrants and the poor). He infuses his account with the history of American medicine, the growing pains of New York City, and a cadre of captivating and calamitous characters. Established in 1736, Bellevue began as an almshouse and pesthouse. It is the nation's oldest and largest public hospital. Bellevue is branded in American culturein film (The Lost Weekend); in its roster of notable patients (Sylvia Plath, Stephen Foster, O. Henry, Charlie Parker); and in expose (Nelly Bly's Ten Days in a Mad-House). Despite its many contributions to medical education, research, public health, and clinical care, Bellevue in the minds of most seems inescapably linked to uproar and insanity. Yet it was the first American hospital to establish a nursing school for women, an ambulance fleet, a maternity ward, and a forensic-medicine lab. Oshinsky pulls no punches. Bellevue is far from a perfect place. But his main message is in sync with the hospital's mission of providing care for all: When others flinched or turned their backs, Bellevue stayed the course. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)