How An Unlikely Cohort of Black Nurses at a New York Tuberculosis Sanatorium Helped Cure Tuberculosis

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2023

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

Nearly a century before the COVID-19 pandemic upended life as we know it, a devastating tuberculosis epidemic was ravaging hospitals across the country. In those dark, pre-antibiotic days, the disease claimed the lives of 1 in 7 Americans; in the United States alone, it killed over 5.6 million people in the first half of the twentieth century. Nowhere was TB more rampant than in New York City, where it spread like wildfire through the tenements, decimating the city’s poorest residents. The city’s hospital system was already overwhelmed when, in 1929, the white nurses at Staten Island’s Sea View Hospital began quitting en masse. Pushed to the brink of a major labor crisis and fearing a public health catastrophe, city health officials made a call for black female nurses seeking to work on the frontlines, promising them good pay, education, housing, and employment free from the constraints of Jim Crow.

Today’s guest is Maria Smilios, author of “The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis.” We look at the unlikely ways in which public health developed in America, by means of these nurses who put in 14-hour days caring for people who lay waiting to die or, worse, become “guinea pigs” to test experimental (and often deadly) drugs at a facility that was understaffed and unregulated.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Sky here with another episode of the History Unplugged podcast, one of the most common ways
0:09.0	to die in the past that's no longer common now, was by tuberculosis.
0:13.2	Before Antibiotics, TB claimed the lives of one in seven Americans, it killed over 5
0:17.3	million people in the first half of the 20th century.
0:20.1	No where was TB more rampant than in New York, where it spread like wildfire through the
0:23.9	tenements, decimating the city's poorest residents.
0:26.6	A solution to this crisis were sanatoriums.
0:29.3	These were places that provided treatment for TB patients and took them out of their homes,
0:33.2	which reduced the chance for spread and gave them access to fresh air, good food and
0:37.1	sometimes surgery.
0:38.1	Nearly a thousand sanatoriums were built by 1950, and one of the most important ones was
0:42.5	see-view hospital, where a critically important cure for TB was developed.
0:46.3	We're going to focus on this hospital in this episode because it's a site of one of
0:50.4	the most important medical breakthroughs in the 20th century, but inadvertently became
0:54.9	extremely important in the civil rights movement.
0:57.1	That's because it almost shut down in 1929 when nurses there began quitting and mass.
1:02.4	Pushed to the brink of a major labor crisis and fearing a public health catastrophe, city
1:06.3	health officials made a call for black female nurses seeking to work on the front lines,
1:10.9	promising them good pay, education, housing and employment free for the concerns of Jim
1:15.1	Crow.
1:16.1	To tell the story of see-view and the unlikely nurses that made it one of the most important
1:19.9	hospitals in the history of American public health, is Maria Smilios, author of the
	...

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