History of America’s most storied hospital

A fault line lies across the history of Bellevue Hospital so that the rumble of major social trends, political history and, less surprisingly, changes in scientific understanding create seismic waves that ripple through the iconic Manhattan hospital. In fact, when it comes to medical history, some of the waves begin at Bellevue.

David Oshinsky follows these many tremors in this deeply engrossing history, “Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital.”

In its 300-year history, thousands of the humble and the famous (William S. Burroughs, Eugene O’Neill, Charlie Parker, Leadbelly, Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, to name a few) have crowded its corridors. Hosts of medical students and doctors followed for the unrivaled experience of treating every kind of disease, accident and misfortune suffered by Bellevue’s patients.

The Civil War filled Bellevue’s beds and led to innovations we take for granted — ambulance service and professional nursing. Its doctors battled their own civil war as medicine moved from the idea that disease was spread by bad air to a knowledge of germs, and the grim truth that physicians were contributing to the death of their patients.

In more recent decades, crack cocaine and the surge of homelessness nearly overwhelmed it. These were perhaps the hospital’s biggest threat until Superstorm Sandy overwhelmed it, leading Bellevue to close its doors for the only time in its long history.

There is no easy narrative path through this material, yet Oshinsky has wrestled an institutional history of significant complexity into a compelling tale. Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer for “Polio: An American Story,” Oshinsky is a master of finding and relating memorable anecdotes to embody the history. The result is a serious story studded with juicy and occasionally blood-curdling bits from the past: physicians experimenting on the unknowing patients, rats frolicking in the wards, gruesome murder trials in which Bellevue’s forensic experts play roles in nailbiting whodunits. Oshinsky also tackles the more daunting aspects of the Bellevue story, such as the role and funding of public hospitals, a potentially dry topic brought vividly to life through Bellevue’s repeated fights to thrive and, at times, to survive.

Bellevue, above all things, has been a place for people with nowhere else to turn. “The patients it currently serves are every bit as poor and needy as the patients who preceded them in centuries past. And those with viable options almost always wind up going somewhere else,” Oshinsky writes. “That’s what makes Bellevue so comforting and so disquieting. It stands, for all its troubles, as a vital safety net, a place of caring and a place of last resort.”