Notes
INTRODUCTION
“If a cop gets shot”: Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients (2012), 2–3.
“It was never the tidiest”: William Nolen, “Bellevue: No One Was Ever Turned Away,” American Heritage (February–March 1987).
“a staggeringly ugly experience”: New York Times, December 3, 1945.
“spades”: Norman Mailer, “Bellevue Diary,” Norman Mailer Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas.
“When I first knew”: Frederick Covan, quoted in New York Post, April 1, 2008.
Chapter 1: Beginnings
“And they took counsel”: Matthew 27:7.
“The field lies in the neighborhood”: I. N. P. Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island (1926), vol. 5, 1340.
“The wheels of these chariots”: Life and Writings of Grant Thorburn Prepared by Himself (1852), 46–50.
“Here lies the body of James Jackson”: New York Times, October 28, 2009.
“It is important to remark”: Ibid., November 12, 2009.
“the reception and cure”: “History of Pennsylvania Hospital, Penn Medicine, www.uphs.upenn.edu.
“laid the beams and raised the roof”: Claude Heaton, “The Origins and Growth of Bellevue Hospital,” The Academy Bookman (1959), 3–10.
“to be Lousey”: Ibid.
“the seed from which grew”: John Starr, Hospital City (1957), 9.
“the prodigious influx”: Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, September 15, 1794, 101.
“delightfully situated”: Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lindley Murray (1827), 48–49.
“For SALE or to be LET”: New York Daily Advertiser, January 29, 1788.
“to serve as a hospital”: Francis Beekman, “The Origins of Bellevue Hospital,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly (July 1953), 214.
“The yellow fever will discourage the growth”: Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Rush, The Letters of Thomas Jefferson, September 23, 1800.
“effluvia arising directly from the body”: Gary Shannon, “Disease Mapping and Early Theory of Yellow Fever,” Professional Geographer (1981), 221–27; Bob Arnebeck, “Yellow Fever in New York City,” copy in author’s possession.
“five or six”: Arnebeck, “Yellow Fever in New York City.”
“covered with blisters”: Valentine Seaman, An Account of the Epidemic Yellow Fever as It Appeared in the City of New York in 1795 (1796), 3.
“Passed a restless and perturbed night”: The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith, September 6, 1795 (reprinted 1973 by the American Philosophical Society).
“to prevent the infectious Distemper”: Minutes of the New York City Health Committee, in Beekman, “The Origins of Bellevue Hospital.”
“Dr. Smith reported”: Ibid.
“In consequence of [this] rejection”: Matthew Livingston Davis, A Brief Account of the Epidemical Fever Which Lately Prevailed in the City of New York (1796), 17–18.
“in a state of confusion”: Alexander Anderson Diary, August 24, 1795, in Frederick Burr, Life and Works of Alexander Anderson (1893).
“reading all the medical books within reach”: Ibid., Appendix A, 84.
“My present employment”: Alexander Anderson Diary, October 10, 1795.
“[They] consist of Mr. Fisher”: Ibid., August 24, 1795.
“We lost three patients today”: Ibid., September 15, 1795.
“Another patient sent up in shocking condition”: Ibid., August 27, 1795.
“She is addicted to liquor”: Ibid., October 8, 1795.
“glory in a disregard to Feelings”: Ibid., August 30, 1795.
“Dr. Chickering’s timidity”: Ibid., July 30, 1798.
“Nearly 750 of [our] inhabitants”: “Report to the Governor,” in Beekman, “The Origins of Bellevue Hospital,” 226.
“I passed three months among yellow fever patients”: Burr, Life and Works, Appendix A, 85.
“I soon discovered”: Ibid., 86.
“I am really desperate”: Ibid.
“apprenticed to Dr. Charlton” and others: Appendix: “List of Medical Practitioners of Eighteenth Century New York City and Long Island,” in Marynita Anderson, Physician Heal Thyself (2004), 150–89.
“who had a reputation for skill with the sick”: Zachary Friedenberg, The Doctor in Colonial America (1998), 107–10; Byron Stookey, A History of Colonial Medical Education, 11–18; Ira Rutkow, Seeking the Cure (2010), 7–27.
Those in medical practice routinely described themselves: List of alternate professions in Physician Heal Thyself, 151–89.
“The law makes no account”: New York Literary Gazette, vol. 2 (1827), 21.
“Bloodletting was the single most”: Robert Golder, “Visual and Artifactual Materials in the History of Early American Medicine,” in Robert Golder and P. J. Imperato, Early American Medicine: A Symposium (1987), 7.
“a reflex for physicians”: J. Worth Estes, “Patterns of Drug Use in Colonial America,” in ibid., 29–37.
an average calendar day: New York City physician calendar contains a list of patients combined from: Dr. Samuel Seabury, “Account Book, 1780–1781,” Manuscripts Division, New-York Historical Society (NYHS); and “Fees of Dr. William Lawrence,” in John Bard, The Doctor in Old New York (1898), 310–11, copy on file in NYHS.
The final treatment of George Washington: Drs. James Craik and Elisha Dick, “News from ‘The Times,’ ” reprint from Medical Repository (1800), 311; Peter Henriques, “The Final Struggle Between George Washington and the Grim King,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (1999), 73–91.
His tombstone: Shearith Israel cemetery, http://www.placematters.net/node/1475.
“the Samson of drugs”: Rutkow, Seeking the Cure, 38.
“Two young seamen”: Alexander Anderson Diary, August 27, 1798.
“I was up all night”: Ibid., July 3, 1798.
“The sight of [her]”: Ibid., September 12, 13, 1798.
“I feel surpris’d”: Ibid., September 14, 21, 1798.
“A tremendous scene have I witnessed”: Ibid., December 31, 1798.
“Constant employment”: Alexander Anderson, Autobiography, in Burr, Life and Works of Alexander Anderson, Appendix A, 90.
“opened only upon extraordinary occasions”: Davis, A Brief Account of the Epidemical Fever Which Lately Prevailed in the City of New York, 16–17.
“So odious is the idea”: Ibid.
Chapter 2: Hosack’s Vision
“raising a considerable clamor”: New York Packet, April 25, 1788; also Steven Wilf, “Anatomy and Punishment in Late Eighteenth Century New York,” Journal of Social History (1989), 511–13.
“Through your excess”: Jules Ladenheim, “The Doctors’ Mob of 1788,” Journal of the History of Medicine (Winter 1950), 22–43.
“the reception of such patients”: James J. Walsh, “The Doctors Riot and the Quest for Anatomical Material,” in Walsh, History of Medicine in New York, vol. 2 (1919), 378–91.
“In the anatomy room”: Ladenheim, “The Doctors’ Mob of 1788,” 23–43.
“seriously interrupted the cordial feeling”: Ibid.
“to Prevent the Odious Practice”: Laws of New York State, 1887, 12th Session, vol. 11, 5.
“sufferings during the whole”: David Hosack to William Coleman, August 17, 1804, Alexander Hamilton Papers, Library of Congress, Founders Online.
“knocked down with a stone”: “David Hosack,” in Samuel Gross, Lives of Eminent American Physicians (1861), 291.
“the most proximate cause of the disease”: A. E. Hosack, A Memoir of the Late David Hosack (1861), 293.
“he is liberal”: Ibid., 34; Ruth Woodward, Princetonians: 1784–1790: A Biographical Directory (1991), 405.
“long and habitual observation”: Robert W. Hoge, “A Doctor for All Seasons: David Hosack of New York,” American Numismatic Society Magazine (Spring 2007), 46–55.
“He carried me to a bad [place]”: The Commissioners of
the Almshouse vs. Alexander Whistelo…, 1808, New-York Historical Society (NYHS). Also, Craig S. Wilder, Ebony and Ivy (2013), 211–20.
“Why would a woman”: The Commissioners of the Almshouse vs. Whistelo.
“haggard paupers”: Raymond Mohl, Poverty in New York (1971), 84.
“Not half an hour before he expired”: Ezra Stiles Ely, Journal: The Second Journal of the Stated Preacher to the Hospital and Almshouse of the City of New York (1813).
“six [additional] acres”: Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, April 29, 1811.
“Stone Cutters, Carpenters”: Ibid., November 27, 1811.
“Proposals Will Be Received”: New York Journal, April 19, 1811.
“There is no eleemosynary establishment”: Timothy Dwight, Travels in New-England and New-York, vol. 3 (1823), 440.
“Some of you, I am persuaded”: John Sanford, “Divine Benevolence to the Poor on Opening the Chapel on the New Alms-House, Bellevue” (1816), copy on file at NYHS.
“The Building lately erected”: Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, December 5, 1825.
“vile, offensive, and pestilential”: Mohl, Poverty in New York, 25.
“Shipping and trade”: Charles Bouldan, “Public Health in New York City,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine (June 1943), 423.
“great depth and unusual purity”: Ted Steinberg, Gotham Unbound (2014), 44–50.
“most miserable I ever beheld”: Tyler Anbinder, “From Famine to Five Points,” American Historical Review (April 2002), 360.
“I saw more drunk folks”: Tyler Anbinder, Five Points (2001), 26.
“world of vice and misery”: Ibid.
“so long as immense numbers”: Edmund Blunt, Stranger’s Guide to the City of New York (1817), quoted in Eclectic Review (January–June 1819), 274.
“The smoke and stench”: Abel Stevens, ed., “The Five Points,” National Magazine (1853), 267–71.
“well-filled stage coaches”: Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years (1962), 33–34.
“O’Neill was seized with the malignant cholera”: Reports of Hospital Physicians and Other Documents Relating to the Cholera Epidemic of 1832 (1832).
“Mr. Fitzgerald was by trade a tailor”: Ibid.
“physical stimulation”: Ibid.
“Vomiting followed”: Ibid.
“The patient has only then to recover”: Ibid.
“I am already satisfied”: Ibid.
“Tobacco has been administered”: Ibid.
“stepping over the dead and dying”: Page Cooper, The Bellevue Story (1948), 34.
“I believe it is detrimental to many persons”: Medical and Surgical Reporter (July–December 1866), 456.
“Those sickened must be cured or die off”: John Wilford, “How Epidemics Helped Shape the Modern Metropolis,” New York Times Learning Network (April 16, 2008).
“Overcoming sometimes violent resistance”: Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham (1999), 786.
“represented the infancy of the art”: George Pierson, Tocqueville in America (1938), 90.
Chapter 3: The Great Epidemic
“a random patient, with a random disease”: New England Journal of Medicine (1964), 449.
“many times greater”: Eric Larrabee, The Benevolent and Necessary Institution (1971), 120, 215.
“One visited nice persons”: Charles Rosenberg, “The Practice of Medicine in New York City a Century Ago,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1967), 229–30.
“the best schools of Europe…the inhalation of ether…The treatment”: Philip Van Ingen, The First Hundred Years of the New York Medical and Surgical Society (1946), 6–14.
“Doctor, I got your bill”: John Starr, Hospital City (1957), 61.
“People labor under the delusion”: George Rosen, Fees and Bills (1946), 89.
“a single day on the exchange”: Ibid., 7.
“Dodge, Jonathan, M.D.”: Longworth’s American Almanac: New York Registry and City Directory (1857), 208.
“the rich man’s friend”: Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City (1994), 55.
“the honest workmen”: New York Evening Post, December 12, 1828.
“a bottle or tea-cup”: Charles Rosenberg, “The Rise and Fall of the Dispensary System,” Journal of the History of Medicine (1974), 32–54.
“lure only the young”: New York Times, May 28, 1855.
“a practical school”: Rosenberg, “The Rise and Fall of the Dispensary System,” 33.
“are nothing less than a promiscuous charity”: W. Gill Wylie, Hospitals: The History, Organization, and Construction (1877), 4, 64.
“deserving American poor”: Rosenberg, “The Rise and Fall of the Dispensary System,” 46–47.
“a public receptacle for poor invalids”: Larrabee, The Benevolent and Necessary Institution, 40.
“Persons [of] Decrepitude”: William Russell, “The Organization and Work of Bloomingdale Hospital,” State Hospital Quarterly (August 1919), 437.
“Imagine a lunatic asylum”: Report of the Special Committee…Relative to a New Organization of the Hospital Department of the Alms-House (1837), 343–45.
“hardened infidels”: Charles Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers (1987), 45.
“The opportunities for relief”: Stephen Klips, “Institutionalizing the Poor: The New York City Almshouse,” PhD diss., NYU (1980), 5–7.
“exceptionally bad habits”: Alan Kraut, “Illness and Medical Care Among Irish Immigrants,” in Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher, The New York Irish (1996), 159–61.
“The potato was the staff of life”: Hasia Diner, “The Most Irish City in the Union,” in ibid., 89–90.
“Ten deaths among one hundred passengers”: Kraut, “Illness and Medical Care Among Irish Immigrants,” 155.
“removed before ignition”: Kathryn Stephenson, “The Quarantine War: The Burning of the New York Marine Hospital in 1858,” Public Health Reports (January 2004), 79–92.
To scroll through the fatalities: Robert Carlisle, An Account of Bellevue Hospital, with a Catalogue of the Medical and Surgical Staff from 1736 to 1893 (1894), 107–360.
“At least two-fifths of those who die”: Klips, “Institutionalizing the Poor,” 386–88.
“It is a subject worthy of congratulation”: Fourth Annual Report of the Governors of the Alms-House, New York for the Year 1852 (1852), 12.
“nine of twenty-two”: Dr. A. L. Loomis, “The History of Typhus Fever as It Occurred in Bellevue Hospital,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine (January 1865), 348–57.
“A thorough change in the mode of governing”: Dr. D. R. McCready, “Remarks,” Bellevue and Charity Hospitals (1870), v–xi.
“granting their services gratuitously”: Rules and Regulations for the Government of Bellevue Hospital (1852), copy on file at New-York Historical Society.
“three of his students”: Ibid.
“bleeding, cupping, leeching, and dressing wounds”: Ibid.
“All are received upon common footing”: Ibid.
“No person shall be admitted”: Ibid.
“only patients who are unable to pay”: Ibid.
“Who shall take care of our sick?”: Bernadette McCauley, Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick? (2005), viii.
“Many are brought in wholly ignorant”: Mary Stanley, Hospitals and Sisterhoods (1855), 1–2.
“a royal hunting ground”: McCauley, Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick?, 9.
“just about the finest thing”: Richard Shaw, Dagger John (1977), 209.
“board, washing, nursing”: Sister Marie Walsh, With a Great Heart (1965), 13–22.
“Building in New York”: McCauley, Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick?, 53.
“To clergymen and other persons”: John Francis Richmond, New York and Its Institutions (1871), 376.
“serve for life”: Ibid., 377–78.
“The institution is open every day”: Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (
1857), 323.
“of the best in the city”: Russel Viner, “Abraham Jacobi and German Medical Radicalism in Antebellum New York,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1992), 434–63.
“buried among Yehudim…tefillin and zizit”: Hyman Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community in New York (1945), 156.
“There were over 800 persons present”: New York Times, February 6, 1852, May 18, 1955.
“whose liberal bequeath”: Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community in New York, 158–59.
“in cases of accident or emergency”: Tina Levitan, Islands of Compassion (1964), 27, 30.
“Somewhere in a Jewish cemetery today”: B. A. Botkin, New York City Folklore (1956), 149–50.
“poor Italians”: McCauley, Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick?, 12.
“Here our rich men”: McCready, “Remarks,” vii–xv.
“Myriads swarm at the water side”: New York Times, April 27, 1860.
“At six Monday morning”: Ibid.
Chapter 4: Teaching Medicine
“pocketing an unlawful fee”: Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, November 3, 1847.
“It is well known”: Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002), 127.
“For the sake of living humanity”: “An Appeal to the State of New York,” American Lancet (October 1853–March 1854), 109.
“All vagrants, dying, unclaimed”: Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 122–35.
“By offering up their bodies”: “A Debt Repaid, Nativism and Dissection in New York State,” unpublished paper in author’s possession.
“whose vices have worn out”: Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 130.
“Better that the causes”: Harper’s New Monthly (April 1854), 690–94.
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