Bellevue is a site with an immense legacy, an almost monumental presence in the history of American medicine. Its story is littered with notable firsts and achievements: the first ambulance service, the first dedicated maternity ward, the first trials of countless influential treatments (Oshinsky). Bellevue’s history is complicated, however, by the experiences of its patients. Its legacy of treating the public, offering care to those marginalized by their illnesses and disabilities, represents a triumph for the ideals of public medicine. But its history also tracks the evolution of medicine, and of hospitals as institutions in America. Bellevue opened as a “pesthouse,” a hospital for the poor and destitute, in 1736. As the oldest public hospital, it has served crisis after crisis, for outbreaks of yellow fever in the nineteenth century to the AIDS crisis at its height (Frusciano & Pettit 89).
But Bellevue has at many points in its history become synonymous with understaffed, underfunded public hospital system. As such, its relationship with the public has been contentious, from fears over its dissection of cadavers to unethical experiments to its association in the 20th century with psychiatric illness and, accordingly, an image as a menacing, foreboding prison for the insane. It has become an imaginary nexus for both the virtues and the pitfalls of the public health system in America. In response, my timeline shuttles between both of these stories, those of the hospital’s achievements, and those of patients’ vexed relationships with the institution. I’ve chosen to include its cultural touchstones, like the 1945 best picture winner “Lost Weekend,” set and filmed at Bellevue, as well as sensational news stories that have contributed to its popular perceptions.
As a building, Bellevue’s design tracks changes in hospital design and in transformations in therapeutic theory. Its relocation from downtown to its current location allowed patients access to fresh air and river views, but also put it out of the minds of lawmakers downtown (Burrows & Wallace 112, Marks & Beatty). Attempts to redevelop the closed psychiatric hospital, now used as a homeless shelter, have brought to public discussion the hospital’s function within the larger social landscape, constituting somewhat of a roundtrip for the institution (Rubinstein). Events like Hurricane Sandy have demonstrated just how crucial a role Bellevue plays in New York’s social landscape (He et. al). My timeline’s use of these events is designed to suggest the institution’s engagement with the city’s politics, culture, and geography. Bellevue operates on different scales, from local politics to international transformations in models of public health. My timeline hopes to draw attention to the ways Bellevue has responded to but also produced medical culture across these scales, adding up to a rich and layered history that must be read not only for its achievements but for the sorts of individual experiences it produced.
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