The Black Angels
The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis, as seen on BBC Two Between the Covers
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nurse shortage.
So begins the remarkable true story of the Black nurses who helped cure tuberculosis, one of the world's deadliest plagues, told alongside the often strange chronicle of the cure's discovery.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE 2024
'A tour de force' PEN
'Gripping' New York Times
'Wonderfully told . . . an invaluable restoration of another of history's racially biased omissions' Diana Evans
'Their triumphant story has until now been almost completely neglected' The Bookseller
'Informative, enthralling, and sometimes appalling, this is history at its best' Booklist
During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed 1 in 7 people, white nurses at Sea View, 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 vital work in the race for the cure for tuberculosis and subsequently helping to find it 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 centre 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.
