From ‘child torturing’ doctors to ops carried out on conscious patients: The dark past of New York’s top mental hospital Bellevue
New book reveals its 'grisly reputation as a dumping ground for the terminally ill and unwanted' - and the shocking experiments performed on them
BELLEVUE Hospital in New York is today considered one of the best psychiatric medical facilities in the US.
However, a new book has lifted the lid on the centre’s dark and disturbing past, which tells of Frankenstein-style experiments on patients, electroshock therapy performed on children, ops without anaesthetics and rats feeding on sick babies.
The hospital, located on the east side of New York City, opened its doors in 1736 and was designed to treat low-income victims of disease, from cholera to the plague.
It soon gained a reputation for being a hospital that cared for seriously injured crime victims, the mentally ill and the homeless – and its doctors were known to perform experimental procedures on unwitting patients.
In his book Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital, David Oshinsky reveals scores of bizarre experiments carried out on people – including an early facial reconstruction operation to create a nose made out of a patient's middle finger.
Doctors also injected boiling hot tobacco juice into the arm of a pregnant woman who was suffering from cholera.
Oshinsky writes in his book: “Bellevue's hold on our popular imagination has come at a price.
“The relentless focus on its eccentricities has obscured its role as our quintessential public hospital - the flagship institution of America's largest city, where free hospital care is provided to the ‘medically indigent’ as a right, not a privilege.
“Almshouse, pesthouse or death house - these are the indelible roots of Bellevue Hospital, thrust deep in the bedrock of America's fastest growing city.”
It didn’t take the hospital long to earn a “grisly reputation as a dumping ground for the terminally ill and unwanted”.
With immigrants arriving by the thousands each day, the city struggled to accommodate those looking to start a new life – and diseases swept through the swelling population.
The masses of impoverished civilians who couldn’t afford private care had no choice but to seek medical help at the public hospital.
However, Oshinsky reveals medical staff working at the facility held their poor, chronically ill patients “too near to the grave to care”.
Bellevue became a training centre for US medicine, with eager young doctors snatching corpses from graveyards to dissect for study.
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On one occasion in 1788, children spotted a dead body hanging in a second floor window – prompting the kids’ fathers to storm the building and steal the corpse.
Oshinsky writes: “In the anatomy room were found three fresh (corpses), one boiling in a kettle, two others cut up with certain parts of the two sexes hanging up in a most brutal position.”
Although the dissectors were sent to jail, the sick practice was still going on 60 years later – with New York’s medical schools relying on grave robbers to meet “anatomical needs”.
Overcrowding was a huge issue at the hospital, prompting the construction of a new complex close by in the 1840s.
But the immigrants continued pour in, all trying to escape famine and persecution, so the wards remained rammed.
As a result, rat infestations became rife – with the hungry pests occasionally feasting on the flesh of sick babies.
Patients were even hoarded into baths, with one visitor in 1860 witnessing 60 people washing in a single tub.
The New York Times reported on the horrifying vermin problems at the time, quoting an affidavit from a Bellevue physician: “Myriads swarm at the water side after nightfall, crawl through the sewers and enter the hospital.
“I immediately examined, and found (a) child beneath the hips of the mother, in a lifeless condition, and mutilated, apparently by rats.
“The nose… upper lip and a portion of the cheeks seemed to be eaten off.
“The toes of the left boot and a portion of the foot were eaten off, or apparently so. The lacerated portions were covered with sand and dirt.”
Many operations were performed without anaesthesia, with gall stones and even testicles removed and “instruments slicing through human flesh and bone” while the patients were awake, sedated only by swigs of whiskey.
Poor hygiene was also widespread among surgeons, who rarely washed their hands or sanitised their surgical tools – transferring deadly particles from the morgue to newborn babies.
Convulsive therapy with insulin made its US debut at the hospital in the 1920s to treat patients in the “disturbed” wards.
It involved injecting high doses of a chemical stimulant that caused “explosive” seizures capable of breaking bones – but doctors considered it an effective way to calm the deeply disturbed.
Bellevue psychiatrist Joseph Wortis never discussed the risks with patients and didn’t stop administering the insulin shock therapy despite complaints of bad headaches, shakes and no positive results from the treatment.
The hospital then moved on to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) , founded by Italian psychologist Ugo Cerletti.
ECT was viewed as a better, safer option - but it resembled “the fictional experiments of Mary Shelley's Dr Frankenstein”.
Thousands were subjected to it via strong electrical currents to the head, turning patients into “amiable vegetables”.
In 1942, Dr Lauretta Bender, in the children's ward at Bellevue, subjected more than a hundred children, some as young as four years old, to regular ECT – backed by generous funding from the US Public Health Services.
However, her practices backfired on her 12 years later when it emerged her experiments had done more harm than good for the children she ‘treated’.
Former patients have told horror stories of their time at Bellevue, including Ted Chabasinski who, at the age of six, was subjected to ECT at the hands of Dr Bender in 1944.
Describing Dr Bender as “cold as ice”, he recalled being dragged into treatment kicking and biting the rag stuffed in his mouth before being abused and raped in the children’s ward.
Despite its sordid past, Bellevue has treated a series of famous names for psychological disorders over the decades – including saxophonist Charlie 'Bird' Parker, American writer William S Burroughs, poet Sylvia Plath and novelist Norman Mailer.
And following John Lennon's assassination in 1980, his dead body was taken to Bellevue morgue.
Today, Bellevue stands proud as one of America’s greatest medical centres – and its emergency services are lauded the world over.
Oshinsky writes: “Its clinics provide first-rate primary care, and its doctors are master diagnosticians, having seen just about everything.”
