Morbid Fact Du Jour For January 10, 2011
Today’s Desperately Ill Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Bellevue Hospital in New York City was built on land that once nourished a farm called Belle Vue, for its beautiful prospect on the river. The first hospital building had been constructed there in 1811; only 8 years later Bellevue became the first U.S. hospital to formally require a qualified physician to pronounce a death (after a desperately ill man had been discovered among the corpses stacked on the morgue wagon). Its ambulance system started in 1869; its children’s clinic (the first in the nation) in 1874; its chest clinic, to combat tuberculosis, in 1903. It was from the start a public hospital – in the winter of 1915, nearly a thousand people were treated at Bellevue every day. “It gathers the dead and dying from river and streets and is kept busy night and day with the misery of the living,” wrote one New York Times reporter, attempting to capture the rather ominous mystique of the place.
Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook
Of course, I always think of the lovely Bruce Springsteen line, “They’re waiting for you at Bellevue with their oxygen masks” when I think of this place… Ah, romance.
