The Black Angels
The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Christopher Award 2024
NPR Science Friday Best Summer Beach Reads 2024
Gotham Book Finalist 2024
NASW Science in Society Journalism Award Finalist 2024
PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize Finalist 2024
"An incredible story...the writing is phenomenal." —John Green, author of Everything Is Tuberculosis
New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage.
In the pre-antibiotic days when tuberculosis stirred people’s darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. 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 sanatorium, dubbed “the pest house,” where it was said that “no one left alive.”
Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this remarkable true story follows the intrepid young women known by their patients as the “Black Angels.” For twenty years, they risked their lives working under appalling conditions while caring for New York’s poorest residents, who languished in wards, waiting to die, or became guinea pigs for experimental surgeries and often deadly drugs. But despite their major role in desegregating the New York City hospital system—and their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculosis at Sea View—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 riveting story, celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her evocative debut, essayist Smilios tells the story of the Black nurses at Staten Island's Seaview Hospital, which, during its heyday in the 1940s and '50s, was the largest tuberculosis sanitarium run by a city government in the U.S. She focuses on the Black Southern nurses who were recruited to work there starting in 1929 after a mass resignation of white nurses due to poor working conditions and fear of the disease (at the time, tuberculosis killed one in seven people). Smilios profiles individual nurses, some of whom worked in the ward for more than 20 years, against a detailed historical backdrop, including the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North and the work done by the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses to garner respect and professional opportunities for its members. After WWII, the narrative shifts to the discovery of the antibiotic isoniazid and its trial as a cure for tuberculosis at Seaview, which was administered by the hospital's Black nurses. Smilios's narrative is sympathetically told in rich if sometimes flowery prose. (In one passage set in the surgery theater, Smilios describes "lungs whose surface resembled the moon, full of craters and rims" and the stench from corpses rising "like an invisible dark matter.") Historical fiction aficionados will want to take a look.
