It is, perhaps, too early to congratulate New York on havin’ escaped the cholera, but the metropolis can certainly be congratulated on the fact that it is infinitely better prepared to meet that or any other scourge, smallpox included, than it was in the last generation, or when I first settled in New York. People can hardly form an idea how horrible (yes, horrible is the word) was the condition of the leadin’ hospitals and of the whole health department, if there was such a thing in New York, then.
Take Bellevue Hospital, for example. There is not a vile place in New York to-day that will compare in point of filth, brutal cruelty and gross mismanagement with the Bellevue Hospital of my early New York days.
All kinds of disease, social and moral, were huddled together at Bellevue; sickness and crime were alike treated there, or rather alike maltreated.
Lunatics were sent there, though it was about the worst place in the world for an insane or sane man. The lunatics received no special care, had no particular portion of the establishment allotted to ‘em, but wandered to and fro as their diseased wits led ‘em, doin’ mischief to ‘emselves and others. On one occasion a madman ran amok through the wards, overturnin’ what furniture there was, throwin’ the sick out of their beds, and thereby causin’ the death of half a dozen patients. Then he grappled furiously with the keepers who tried to restrain him, and in the struggle a red-hot stove was overturned and a dyin’ man nearly burned to death before his time.
Criminals were also received at Bellevue in those days, and the hospital (?) was full of petty thieves, who stole everything they could lay their hands on, and who managed, amid the general confusion, to get their hands on pretty nearly everythin’ worth stealin’.
Smallpox patients were also taken in at Bellevue and mixed in with the rest. Instead of bein’ a refuge, the institution became a sort of centre of contagion. Two or three times smallpox patients escaped from Bellevue, and gettin’ out into the streets of New York spread their deadly poison among the multitude.
And then Bellevue was full of paupers–full of vermin-eaten paupers–the worst kind of station house “bums,” who were perhaps the most revoltin’ of all the “residents” of this most “peculiar institution,” which was thus a madhouse, an almshouse, a hospital, a smallpox hospital, and a general pandemonium, all combined.
Pen cannot picture the terrors of a place like the one I have thus summed up. It is easy enough to write about it, but utterly impossible to describe it. It would take the pen of a Dickens or a Hugo to do full Justice to this “‘sheol”–no, only the old version will answer in this case–this “hell.”
It was vile in Summer, when the heat was torrid; but it was worse in Winter. The very air was foul–fouled by the effluvium of the wards and the human bein’s in ‘em. Many a man was indirectly but certainly killed by the very air of this miscalled “hospital.” The arrangements for ventilation were execable. In the centre of the main buildin’ and the wards was a big stove which was always kept, for the convenience of the nurses and keepers, red-hot–so hot that it often produced delirium and death. Yet, at the same time, the poor wretches along the sides of this room were almost frozen by the cold drafts which blew in through the half-opened shutters or the broken window panes.
This hell of a place, literally and soberly speakin’, was presided over by a lot of nurses, keepers and a warden and assistants, all political appointees. The nurses and keepers were nine out of ten vile and worthless, the only difference between ‘em being that of sex. Another difference between them was that while the nurses drank up all the brandy and liquor prescribed by the doctors of the hospital for the sick, the keepers ate up their allowance of food. So that between the keepers devourin’ their solids and the nurses drinkin’ their fluids, about all the poor devils of sufferers at Bellevue got were the gasses, the foul death-laden gasses of this pest place, this black hole of Calcutta, this Libby Prison, all united.
There is no exaggeration, as I have been assured by an old physician who remembers well the place in his earlier days. And the worst feature of the whole was that all this was done, or undone, under the sanction of the local government of the city of New York, which, at that time, had entire charge of Bellevue Hospital, the medical department of the institution bein’ made entirely subservient to the political. As a consequence, it was about equivalent to bein’ killed bein’ sent to Bellevue, and now and then some man or a woman would resist bein’ brought there, and no wonder. Under such circumstances as these it was far better to die in the street than to die in the hospital.
As for a board of health there was practically then no such thing, and the life and death of New Yorkers were really, to a greater extent than we can conceive of now, at the mercy of Ward politicians.
And yet it was to a politician, of the right sort, aided by three good men and great physicians, that the reform of all this horror and the complete transformin’ of old Bellevue into a really beneficial institution, as at present, was due.
The politician of the right sort was Morris Franklin, then President of the Board of Aldermen and now president of the New York Life Insurance Company, and the three good and great doctors were Dr. Wood, Dr. Wilson, and Dr. Drake.
These four, especially the three doctors who were in the buildin’ undertook to root out abuses, and they had their hands full for years. They had undertaken an “all night” job. And the moment they tried to introduce any practical reform the parties affected by the reform forthwith raised all sorts of obstacles and all sorts of howls.
The keepers “kicked.” The nurses vowed they would let the sick nurse ‘emselves. Even the assistant physicians refused any longer to visit the sick at all; so the three doctors, particularly Wood and Wilson, had to do all the drudgery previously attended to by their assistants. For years these devoted reformers, genuine “reformers” indeed, worked at Bellevue Hospital for about twelve hours out of twenty-four straight along, neglectin’ every chance for their own advancement, givin’ up their own private practice, losin’ time and money and incurring obloquy, all from a sense of duty, and from love of humanity.
Their hardest work was in gettin’ rid of the political “influence,” which looked on Bellevue Hospital nearly as a medical custom house, a depot or dumpin’ ground, for patronage. But here Morris Franklin, the politician of the right sort, effectually aided ‘em, and after a four years’ steady fight with ignorance, brutality, carelessness, influence and corruption, the four reformers won.
Bellevue Hospital was reorganized; in fact, changed altogether. Old Bellevue was wiped out and the new Bellevue reigned instead. In the very first year of “the reform system,” although there were fifty-two more patients admitted into Bellevue than the year before, there were fewer deaths by over six hundred. Such figures tell their own story and show what a debt of honor and gratitude New York owes to four men, three of whom daily risked their lives in epidemics of cholera and typhus. And it was from the impetus given to medical reform in this case of Bellevue Hospital that New York really owes its present Board of Health. Let not the names and services of the noble four be forgotten.
[Editor’s notes: The reform push came to a head in 1847. The Medical Journal and Record (vol. 124, 1926) later summarized the effort and those involved: Up to 1847 the history of the institution varies little with its tale of the ever present typhus culminating in the fearful epidemic of 1847-1848, which carried off many of the hospital staff. Matters became so deplorable that Jimmy Wood, a well-known physician politician of the time, made to stir up the authorities to action; and the Post published a series of letters describing conditions. These letters were signed “G” and written, so it is believed, by Dr J. H. Griscom, one time head of the Health Department. The outcome of the agitation was the appointment of another commission of medical men to report on conditions and present a plan for reorganization. Members of this committee were Dr. John W Francis, Dr. James R. Wood, Dr. Joseph M. Smith, Dr. Valentine Mott, Dr. James R, Manley, Dr. F. Campbell Stewart, Dr. Willard Parker, Dr. Stephen Harris, Dr. Gunning S. Bedford, and Dr. Drake. They drew up a plan which was adopted. A board of visiting physicians and was created and placed in authority over the resident physician and so began the end of the rule of [politically appointed] resident physicians. A new medical board was organized which published its first Annual Report the year ending December, 1849.
John Hoskins Griscom’s (1809-1874) subsequent letters to editors helped ensure the passage of the Metropolitan Health Act of 1866, which founded a Board of Health for New York City.
Of the three doctors named in the Harry Hill column, James Rushmore Wood was by far the most prominent. The others were Dr. Benjamin Drake and Dr. William Wilson. An excerpt from the entry on Wood in the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (J. T. White, 1899) reads:
…in 1847 [he] was appointed a member of the medical board of Bellevue Hospital. At that time lunatics and criminals were admitted as patients the nursing was inefficient and but little regard was paid to the laws of hygiene. Aided by Dr. Drake of the board and by Morris Franklin, president of the board of aldermen, Dr. Wood began a reform action that resulted in reducing the annual death rate by 600. During the time that Dr. Wilson was resident physician of Bellevue, Dr. Wood made all the post mortem examinations, amounting to several hundred. He also established Saturday surgical clinics and founded the Wood prize for the best anatomical dissection. In 1861 he aided in founding Bellevue Hospital Medical College and in the same year was appointed to the chair of operative surgery and surgical pathology in that institution, which he held until his death, being made professor emeritus in 1868. He was also surgeon to St. Vincent’s Hospital and the New York Ophthalmic Dispensary and consulting surgeon of the New York Academy of Medicine. In 1847 he began to collect material for a museum which greatly augmented was presented to the commissioners of charities and correction in 1856 and is known as the Wood Museum.
The Wood Museum, which once contained the largest collection of anatomical specimens in the United States, was dispersed or disposed of over the decades. By 1956, no traces of it were said to exist.]
