Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital [L0012]

2017 - PB Excellent condition. 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 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. 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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "It is a fascinating account of the growth, not only of Bellevue and New York City, but also about the growth, practice, and advancement of medicine itself. Anyone interested in medicine would learn much from reading this enlightening book!"; "Brilliant, stirring, moving. The history of Bellevue is the history of New York, and to some extent of America. This is also the history of medicine, of public institutions, and of the slow death of public service as a mission. Given where we are now, reading about the sense of obligation to America's poor, to immigrants, to those unable to care for themselves, made me weepy. Highly recommend this one, It will stay with me."; "The book is wonderfully written in that it gives both a history of Bellevue as well as the development of the other hospitals in New York. But it was Bellevue which managed to have its doors open to all. The author presents this history in an exceptionally readable manner and places it in context with the other institutions in New York. This is definitely a worthwhile read for those interested in New York as well as the development of health care."