![]() Oshinsky's chapters about the early days of medicine are especially, distractingly interesting-so much so that they'll inspire you to read them aloud to anyone who'll listen. "Any exciting book about the history of Bellevue-which this one surely is-is destined to be as much about the history of disease, medicine and New York City as about the hospital itself. ![]() Lively, page-turning, fascinating, this is essential American history. Drawing on a rich trove of newly uncovered archival material and dozens of in-person interviews, Bellevue interweaves the evolution of American medicine from butchery to respectability with New York's growth as this country's preeminent city. In this captivating and masterful new work, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Oshinsky presents a sweeping three-hundred-year chronicle of Bellevue's rise from wretched almshouse infirmary-a place where a patient was more likely to leave in a coffin than to be cured-to a revered public hospital and a premier trauma center for visiting world leaders. In its two and a half centuries of service, there was hardly an epidemic or social catastrophe-or groundbreaking scientific advance-that did not touch its halls. Bellevue Hospital, located on New York City's East Side, occupies a singular place in the public imagination as a warren of mangled crime victims, lunatics, and derelicts, along with celebrity patients from Lead Belly to Norman Mailer to John Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman. ![]()
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