Bellevue: Three Centuries Of Medicine And Mayhem At America's Most Storied Hospital
by David Oshinsky
Buy on AmazonFrom 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.…
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"For many New Yorkers, “Bellevue” is synonymous with “hospital,” and the institution has had an outsized effect on the evolution of modern medicine, treating presidents and paupers alike. Hospital history might not sound like the recipe for a gripping read, but David Oshinsky, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, knows that people like me love a morbid tale of pestilence and human failings, especially when it’s leavened with compassion and innovation. Though Bellevue started out an 18th-century poorhouse where people went to die, it became an incubator of advances that helped create modern medicine, including the germ theory of infection, ambulances, maternity wards and forensic pathology."
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