Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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February/March 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 2
Bellevue Hospital, the oldest hospital in the United States, turned 250 last year. It started as a six-bed ward for the poor, part of an almshouse on lower Broadway, back in 1736, when New York had a population of about nine thousand. As the city grew, Bellevue grew. By 1810 the population of New York was 96,373 and the city fathers were looking for a place to build a real hospital. They purchased a part of what was then Kip’s Bay Farm, between what is now Second Avenue and the East River, around Twenty-eighth Street. The gentleman who originally owned the adjoining land in 1772 had called it Belle View. By 1793 the name had changed to Belle Vue, and in 1825, when the hospital was well established, it was called Bellevue, the name it has had ever since.
By 1870 Bellevue could hold twelve hundred beds and was one of the biggest hospitals in the world. The rich supply of patients had prompted the city fathers to establish Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1861, so that students could benefit from the wide clinical experience the hospital afforded. It was never the tidiest hospital in the world—how could it be, when its policy was always to accept those patients who could with some justice be called the dregs of humanity? At times it was so loaded with victims of typhus, cholera, and yellow fever that, within minutes of a patient’s death, the body was in a coffin and a new patient in the bed. The record shows that on April 20, 1818, a certain Job Young lay grievously ill, obviously about to die of typhus. When he had, supposedly, expired, his body immediately was loaded into a nearby coffin. A half hour later, several people, wandering through a corridor where coffins were stacked, heard a groan emanating from one of the coffins. A hatchet was used to free Mr. Young, who was, indeed, still alive, and he was reassigned to a bed. Valiant attempts were then made to keep him going, but “he lived an hour and a half longer and returned to his narrow house.” This led to one of many subsequent reforms of medical practices in Bellevue: “It was ordered that thereafter no body should be removed until the physicians had first pronounced the person dead.”
Between 1827 and 1847 mortality rates at Bellevue averaged 20 percent, with a high in one year of 33 percent. When William Stewart Halsted—who devised the residency training program that is still the basis for surgical training everywhere in the world—was an attending surgeon at Bellevue (1883–87), he often operated in a tent set up behind the hospital, because he considered the hospital too filthy for his patients. (Incidentally, while at Bellevue, experimenting with cocaine as an anesthetic, Halsted also became a cocaine addict, an addiction he eventually conquered.) In 1888 Halsted moved to Johns Hopkins Hospital,