Bellevue Hospital ArchivesIn 1908 Bellevue Hospital started a day camp on Southfield, a ferryboat, for tuberculosis patients.Bellevue Hospital Center celebrated its 275th anniversary Thursday with what one hospital official called a “conservative, restrained” noontime event, consonant with economic hard times, in the hospital atrium on the east side of Manhattan. Although a 275th birthday might not match up in gravitas to 200 years or 250 or 300, there is a word for it: dodranstricentennial.
Besides, in the coming era of Medicaid cuts and federal healthcare overhaul, mere continuity is to be celebrated at a place like Bellevue, dedicated to serving the poor and uninsured, including illegal immigrants, who will still be uninsured and hence a drain on resources under healthcare reform.
Bellevue Hospital ArchivesBellevue Hospital pictured from the East River, 1848.
In honor of the occasion, the in-house historians at Bellevue have put together a list of firsts at Bellevue, sure to entrance trivia aficionados everywhere.
Bellevue Hospital ArchivesFive members of the Bellevue nursing class of 1887.Bellevue, according to the hospital historians, is the oldest continually operating hospital in the country, from its founding in 1736 as a six-bed infirmary called the Almshouse Hospital on the site of what is now City Hall.
Its maternity ward was founded in 1799, and it incorporated its own medical school, Bellevue Hospital Medical College, in 1861. In 1869, it started the first hospital-based horse-and-buggy ambulance service in the country.
A Bellevue doctor, David Hosack, treated Alexander Hamilton after he was fatally wounded in his duel with Aaron Burr. Two months after graduating from Bellevue Medical College, Dr. Charles Augustus Leale was the first doctor in the box after John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theater, according to the timeline.
Bellevue Hospital Archives
Bellevue Hospital, 1892.
In 1866, Bellevue doctors helped develop New York City’s sanitary code, the first in the world, according to the historians.
Among the famous people who have died at Bellevue is Stephen Foster, composer of “Oh! Susanna” and other old-time hits. Mr. Foster died at 37 in 1864. True to Bellevue’s mission of serving the poor, he was broke. O. Henry, the short-story writer, died at Bellevue in 1910, also destitute. Leadbelly, the folk and blues singer, died at Bellevue in 1949; the hospital timeline does not reveal his financial status.
Hospitals now have itinerant clowns, usually loners who seem to be trying too hard, to entertain patients. But from 1908 to 1967, Bellevue patients were treated to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus performances in the hospital courtyard.
The inventor of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Dr. David Wechsler, was chief psychologist at Bellevue for 25 years, from 1932 on.
Bellevue Hospital ArchivesIn the 1950s, a child life specialist led children during playtime on the pediatric ward.Since 1964, Bellevue has been the New York hospital on stand-by to treat presidents, dignitaries, United Nations diplomats and injured firefighters and police.
Bellevue also occupies some dark corners of history, which the official timeline does not delve into. It is the place where a pregnant pathologist, Kathryn Hinnant, was raped, robbed and strangled in 1989 by a homeless man, Steven Smith. Mr. Smith had secretly lived in the hospital for a month before the murder, and said he had wandered the hospital wearing operating room scrubs and a stethoscope.
To many New Yorkers, the name Bellevue is shorthand for the place where New Yorkers, including criminals, are taken when they go crazy. (Psychiatry, by the way, is one of the few Bellevue services that is bursting at the seams.) The timeline takes note of this only in passing, saying that in 1879, Bellevue “erects a pavilion for the insane within the hospital grounds, an approach deemed revolutionary at the time.”
It does not mention that Jacob Riis, the muckraking journalist, described the “alcoholic cells” in Bellevue as a “way-station” for the poor, who traveled among penitentiary, workhouse and almshouse.
It does not mention that a parade of writers and other creative types went through Bellevue’s psychiatric service: Eugene O’Neill, after attempting suicide; Malcolm Lowry, while being treated for alcoholism; Norman Mailer, after stabbing his wife, Adele Morales.
Or, as Dr. Eric Manheimer, the hospital’s medical director, said the other day, contemplating the meaning of the anniversary: “We take care of everybody.”