Read more
Informationen zum Autor Maria Smilios learned about the Black Angels while working as a science book editor at Springer Publishing. As a native New Yorker and lover of history, medicine, and women’s narratives, she became determined to tell their story. In addition to interviewing historians, archivists, and medical professionals, she spent years immersed in the lives and stories of those close to these extraordinary women. Maria holds a master of arts in religion and literature from Boston University, where she was a Luce scholar and taught in the religion and writing program. In her free time, she enjoys reading, hiking, and hanging out with her tween daughter and their rescue dog, Buddy. The Black Angels is her first book. Klappentext "During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed one in seven people, white nurses at Seaview, New York's largest municipal hospital, began quitting. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed facility, dubbed 'the pest house' where 'no one left alive.' Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this story follows the intrepid young women, the 'Black Angels,' who, for twenty years, risked their lives working under dreadful conditions while caring for the city's poorest--1,800 souls languishing in wards, waiting to die or become 'guinea pigs' for experimental (often deadly) drugs. Yet despite their major role in desegregating the NYC hospital system--and regardless of their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculosis at Seaview--these nurses were completely erased from history. The Black Angels recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this ... story celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival" Leseprobe Chapter 1 The Call for Nurses Spring 1929 No one knew exactly how it started or who set it in motion, but in the spring of 1929, suddenly, inexorably, the white nurses at Sea View Hospital began quitting. One by one, they hung up their uniforms and walked out. Their reasons varied. Many of them were weary of the long commute from Manhattan to Staten Island and the successive days of twelve-hour shifts; some cited the chronic mental and physical toll their job demanded. But most were leaving to escape tuberculosis-the Great White Plague, the robber of youth, the "Captain of the Men of Death"-and its victims: the infected incurable indigent consumptives. That's who came to Sea View, New York's largest municipal sanatorium. On its floors, hundreds of patients lay in iron-frame beds, languishing, their bodies swarming with millions of arrogant microbes that gnawed at their lungs, kidneys, and tongues; their spines and bones and brains. All day long, they sweated and groaned and cried out; they coughed and choked and spit up blood, each hack sending flocks of live germs onto bedpans and sheets, tables, chairs, and doorknobs. The bacteria landed on walls and nightstands and window shades; it drifted under beds and down hallways, slinking into every room and corner of the ward. It was always present, swirling, lurking, waiting to strike anyone who wasn't already sick. And all it took was a single inhalation. Over the years, the nurses watched their colleagues fall ill. They saw how their faces turned ashen, how their eyes burned from a fever that climbed and climbed, and how their skin exuded a sickly odor that no amount of washing could eradicate. Some recovered, at least temporarily; others died in the wards where they once worked, mouthing, "God in Heaven," or "No, no, no," or nothing at all.
