David M. Oshinsky - Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital

T AKEN TO BELLEVUEits a phrase nearly as old as New York City. First used in the eighteenth century to describe yellow fever victims packed off to a desolate pesthouse along the East River, it is so familiar today that newspapers dont bother to add the word Hospital to their headlines: EBOLA DOCTOR TAKEN TO BELLEVUE, WOMAN STRUCK BY BUZZSAW BLADE TAKEN TO BELLEVUE, FAMOUS GRAFFITI ARTIST BUSTED FOR HITTING MAN WITH BEER MUGTAKEN TO BELLEVUE.

It borders on ritual. If a cop gets shot in Manhattan, his first choice is often BellevueIf an investment banker goes into cardiac arrest, his limo driver knows where to take him, writes Eric Manheimer, the hospitals former medical director. The same holds true when a firefighter is injured, a prisoner takes sick, a worker falls from a scaffold, a homeless person lies dazed in the streetthe destination, more likely than not, is Bellevue. Should a visiting pope or president require urgent medical attention, the hospitals superb emergency department awaits.

Bellevue closely mirrors an ever-changing New York. More than a hundred languages are translated at Bellevue, the most common being Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Polish, Bengali, French, and Haitian Creole. Doctors and patients communicate on dual telephones through an interpreter trained in the nuances of regional dialects. The directional signs that guide visitors through the hospital are multilingualthe destinations now include a Muslim prayer room and a clinic for the survivors of political torture. Doctors and nurses have reported cases of a foreigner arriving at Kennedy Airport, hailing a cab, and uttering a single word: Bellevue.

They come knowing they wont be turned away. Every immigrant group has availed itself of Bellevues protective umbrella over the centuries; every disaster and epidemic has packed its spartan wards. It was never the tidiest [place] in the worldhow could it be, when its policy was always to accept those patients who with some justice could be called the dregs of humanity? the gifted surgeon William A. Nolen observed. At times it was so loaded with victims of typhus, cholera, and yellow fever that, within minutes of a patients death, the body was in a coffin and a new patient was in the bed.

One could chart the severity of a New York winter by counting the pneumonia victims on the hospitals Chest Service, or measure the dangers of Prohibition liquor by totaling up the poisoned bodies in the morgue. If tuberculosis was running rampant through the city, then tuberculosis was what Bellevue treated. When AIDS arrived, when violent crime spiked, when addicts turned to crack cocaine, when released state mental patients became homeless, Bellevue usually saw it first.

Few hospitals are more deeply embedded in our popular culture. Tales of Bellevue as a receptacle for mangled crime victims, vicious psychopaths, and hopeless derelicts were always common fare, though the late-nineteenth-century circulation wars between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer churned out especially lurid exposs. The splashiest oneNellie Blys Ten Days in a Mad-Househad an indelible effect. From that point forward, the hospital became synonymous with bedlam, dwarfing its immense achievements in clinical care and medical research.

Hollywood found Bellevue irresistible. Much of Billy Wilders Lost Weekend, the 1945 Academy Award winner for best picture, takes place therethe New York Times called it a staggeringly ugly experience in the Bellevue alcoholic wardand the hospital makes a cameo appearance in the beloved Miracle on 34th Street, when the stubbornly proud Kris Kringle, caged in a tiny cell with barred windows, is deemed delusional and recommended for commitment. In search of the most forbidding hospital to film parts of The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola quite naturally settled on Bellevue, whose morgue served in later scenes as Bonaseras Funeral Home.

It didnt help that Bellevue is a short ambulance ride from Greenwich Village. As such, its six-hundred-bed psychiatric building became a revolving door for legions of writers, artists, and musicians in various states of distress. William Burroughs spent time in Bellevue after cutting off a finger to impress his lover. Delmore Schwartz arrived in handcuffs following an attempt to strangle a hostile book reviewer. Eugene ONeill visited the alcoholic ward often enough to be on a first-name basis with the staff. Sylvia Plath came after suffering a nervous breakdown, and saxophonist Charlie Bird Parker committed himself following two suicide attempts in 1954. (He died the following year.) Bassist Charles Mingus also signed in voluntarily, it was said, to escape a business dispute with the Mafia. He would later compose the jarring Lock Em Up (Hellview of Bellevue) to reflect the mania he found inside.

Poets and novelists such as Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, and Richard Yates have memorialized Bellevue in their work. But the most detailed firsthand account remains unpublished. In 1960, Norman Mailer was committed to Bellevue for stabbing his wife during a drunken rage triggered, apparently, by her taunt that he couldnt shine Dostoyevskys shoes. Mailer kept a private diary of his seventeen days under observation; clogged with detail, it reads like a narrative in search of a plot. Patients come and gospades and junkies, Puerto Rican killers, and teenage hoodlum homosexuals. Guards rule with fists and clubs. Straitjackets restrain the worst offenders. Two men return to Mailers ward, close to unconscious. Both had had shock [treatment], pipe to bite on, pillow under ass, hand on head. Wham. Drool from mouth. Mailer thought about weaving his Bellevue comrades into a piece of long-form journalism, but never did. I said my goodbyes, the diary concludes, feeling quite moved at leaving them.