American Newspaper Repository | Readings

New York World
Thursday November 20, 1902, p. 4.

GRIM BELLEVUE
BRIGHTEST ON
VISITING DAY.

Through New York's Gate of
the Hundred Sorrows Pass
Twenty-five Thousand
Patients Yearly
------
DEATH AS FAMILIAR AS
THE NURSES' ROUNDS.
------
Morgue Receives 2,000 Bodies
Annually, and Sixty Are
There Unclaimed.
------
"HOSPITAL HABIT" AT-
TACKS SOME SUBJECTS.
------
They Return Again and Again and
Ask Treatment for Fancied
Ailments.
------

It was visiting day at Bellevue yesterday.
In that City of the Sick there poured all afternoon a constant stream of visitors--of tearful wives who had left their tubs to spend an hour beside their dying husbands, of frightened children with fresh-washed faces who came to see how mama was, of Bowery thugs to see how some barroom victim did, of sad-faced girls who brought slim bunches of flowers to ease a suffering sweetheart's pain, of anxious mothers, of grieving parents, of brothers, of sisters, of friends.
The nine acres there shelter now nearly as many persons as there were in all New York when Lindley Murray, the grammarian, sold the plot for an almshouse site for 250 English pounds.

Death a Nurse's Joke.
It's an odd place, this Bellevue Hospital.
Death is a nurse's joke here. The dying are "cases," the living "subjects," and cures are "cures" whether the patient lives or dies.
There is no mistaking Bellevue for anything but the hospital it is--the oldest hospital in n the United States.
The grizzled veteran at the gate that lets you in walks with a cane. The elevator man has lost an eye. Even the acting superintendent has but one leg.
They all of them came there as patients. They stayed there as employees. The veteran of all of them is Mr. Rickard, the assistant superintendent.
He came there a boy of sixteen, with a crushed leg. He has been there ever since. That was thirty-one years ago. He knows Bellevue Hospital as no one else knows it.

The Man Who Knows.
As one of the doctors put it:
"Rickard not only knows every brick in the hospital, but he knows how much mortar there is between the bricks."
He is acting superintendent now. He has entire charge of the hospital, he looks after the doctors, he scolds the nurses, he buys the supplies, he supervises the reports.

When he emerges from his offices to hop briskly on his one crutch to supervise some building operations, he passes through a running fire of questions and applicants.
Doctors want to make suggestions, nurses want requisitions, employees want to make complaints, visitors want special favors, reporters want information.
With the familiarity and celerity due to his long training he sees them all and finds time to stop a minute to pat Lexow, a spotted coach dog.
Lexow is an animal illustration of an odd phase of Bellevue life. The dog drifted in there one day and liked the place. He has come back ever since.
They give him his dinner now--some scraps in an old basket. Lexow carries the basket away in his teeth and when he has finished brings the empty basket back.

The Hospital Habit.
And there are lots of patients at Bellevue like Lexow. Having been taken to Bellevue once, they contract the hospital habit—"hospitalism" some of the doctors call it.
There is a young man there now, the doctors' gossip says, who once underwent a surgical operations. It fascinated him. He was cured, but in a few months was back again. Half a dozen times he has been on the operating table, though there is nothing the matter with him.
Curious doctors cut him up whenever they want to investigate the workings of some particular organ, and he doesn't seem to mind it.
Then there are the women "come-backs"--dozens of them.
The mansion dweller calls in a doctor or goes South for the winter. The tenement dweller goes to Bellevue. If she can only persuade the doctors there is something the matter she's sure of a week or two of rest, three meals a day and a good bed to sleep on.

A Busy Place, Bellevue.
It's a busy place, this Bellevue.
Twenty-five thousand cases a year are treated there. Nine thousand dead pass through the morgue. Its present population is 1,300, 760 of whom are patients. Sixty-three came in yesterday.
Rich or poor, sane or crazy, prisoner or free, black or white, all who come to Bellevue go first to the dismal receiving-room, with its stretchers, its wheeled chairs.
A carriage drives up. A business man gets out and confers a minute with the attendants. They help out of the carriage a well-dressed, dishevelled, whiskey wreck, who has come to Bellevue to sober up. He can hardly stand as he mumbles out his name, age, address, friend's name, friend's address, where born, how long in city, father's name, mother's name, and their birth-places.
Even before she calls the doctor the experienced recording clerk writes on the entry slip, "Alcoholism, Ward 32," and enters on the "how arrived" blank, "Came in coach."

"Famous Ward 32."
A doctor looks him over and confirms her diagnosis, and off he goes to the famous Ward 32, where famous lawyers, doctors and even clergymen have gone before him to get "sobered up."
He will be out in a day or two, for on the edge of the slip is written, "Not a prisoner."
With that gray-haired workman who was carried in an alcoholic coma by two policemen it is different. He must stay in the "jag ward," as distinguished from the "bug ward" or insane pavilion, until a policeman comes to take him to court.
There was a time when "drunks" were taken to the police station. A few fractured skulls mistaken for intoxication have changed all that. There are typewritten notices directing ambulance surgeons to bring all cases of coma, whether alcoholic or not, to the hospital.
An electric ambulance dashes up with clanging gong. It is a "transfer" case from one of the other hospitals. Some of them do not take surgical cases, some typhoid cases. Half the patients in Bellevue come there from other hospitals.
Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes a hospital sends its dying patients to Bellevue with a view to keeping down its own death-rate.
Nobody minds deaths at Bellevue. Familiarity breeds contempt of them. The nurses vie with each other to keep patients alive till the other watch comes on.
Go into the baby ward.
A dozen little sufferers are ranged about the room in tiny white cots. A pretty nurse in white cap and apron, looking hardly old enough to be out of school, much less in a hospital, consoles an anxious mother with a word that her baby is better.

A Long Time Dying.
She turns to another crib.
her girlish sympathy for the sorrowing mother is gone. This is a "case." She is the professional nurse.
"The child is a long time dying." It sounds crude and cold and harsh. "It cannot possibly live. It's a remarkable case. Look at its legs."
The child's face is drawn and peaked. There is the death look upon it. The legs are blue and shrivelled to mere bone.
A look at the tab tells the story even if one isn't a doctor--"Residence, Madison street"--a victim of the tainted air, the tainted food, the tainted life of the overcrowded tenement.
But this child has parents who loved it even if they did not know how to care for it properly. There are others here that are nobody's children--found in dark hallways, in ash cans--children whose mothers cast them forth to die.
These have souls, but no names, no pedigrees, only a number fastened on to their tiny wrists, with sticking plaster, so that they will not get mixed up.
The air becomes heavy, oppressive with iodoform. Comes out into the court, where there are trees and grass and fresh air.
Look back at the ramshackle old buildings behind. "The Lord help Bellevue if a fire ever gets started there," you say to yourself.
Supt. Richards will say that now they have the new standpipes in and the fire drill they could put a stream on any part of the building in three-quarters of a minute.
Maybe they could.
On the balcony at the main entrance an inscription catches the eye.
"This railing formed part of the balcony from which George Washington"--
Don't stop to read it. It isn't so. The railing that Washington once leaned over had an eagle and a scroll on it. It went away to the Philadelphia Centennial and never came back. The inscription is still there, but the railing is down in the Sub-Treasury building.

In the Morgue's Shadow.
Out on the porches and lawns of Bellevue are groups of convalescents sunning themselves. That man with the bandaged head fell from a trolley car. That gigantic negro with his hands tied up was injured in a subway blast. Those others were both run down by trolley cars.
Over in the shadow of the Morgue, where sixty bodies lie unclaimed, where a class of medical students are watching an autopsy, a little woman in black is having a picnic with her convalescent son. Under her shawl she smuggled in a bundle with a bit of cake and some of her boy's favorite preserves.
They wit there with the little feast spread out on a bench between them.
Not a hundred feet away, close by the Morgue, closer to the "jag ward," four young doctors are playing tennis.
A shriek from the insane pavilion rings out across the court. Some one is being brutally treated there y the attendants, perhaps?
No, those things don't happen now. They have been banished along with drunken helpers, and quarrelling undertakers and body-selling.
That shriek came from a different cause. A lunatic had piled a chair and washstand against the door of his room. They couldn't get it open. With a craft taught by experience a nurse climbs up to the transom. With a squirt of a seltzer bottle she quickly brings the lunatic to terms.
Seltzer is a great weapon at Bellevue in the "bug-ward" and "jag-ward."