“The largest problem I overcame is the power to inform my story,” stated 92-year-old Virginia Allen, the final surviving Black Angel from Sea View Hospital. She labored within the tuberculosis (TB) sanitarium at Sea View throughout New York’s tuberculosis outbreak, the place a lung specialist developed isoniazid, the lengthy sought-after remedy for tuberculosis.
Allen is an instance of the residing historical past featured in Maria Smilios’s bestselling novel, accessible on Amazon, “The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Treatment Tuberculosis.” Smilios uncovers the story of this group of Black nurses and the way they overcame the lethal TB breakout in a pre-antibiotic period. At the moment, the remoted Sea View Hospital on Staten Island was one of many metropolis’s few municipal hospitals that didn’t discriminate in opposition to Black nurses, together with Harlem, Lincoln, and Metropolitan Hospitals.
The TB sanitarium was understaffed after nearly all of on-staff nurses give up to guard themselves from contracting the illness. TB was the main reason for dying within the nation within the Nineteen Forties. New York Metropolis began the Registration Legislation, a decree ordering medical doctors and nurses to report names and addresses of each particular person sick with TB to the Metropolitan Board of Well being. After knowledge was collected, Sea View’s TB sanitarium was created to carry greater than 2,000 TB sufferers, and was condemned as “the pest home.”
There was a nursing scarcity borough-wide in New York, attributable to WWI. To win the battle in opposition to TB, town began recruiting Black nurses nationwide with the “uncommon alternative” of on-the-job coaching and housing. One in all these Black nurses was then 16-year-old Virginia Allen, who labored and lived within the nurses’ residence dormitory at Sea View from 1947 to 1957.
Allen and Smilios joined moderator Professor Heather Butts, an assistant professor at Columbia College’s Mailman Faculty of Public Well being and a contributor to the AmNews, in a dialogue that explored the challenges highlighted within the ebook and what’s being completed to protect this important a part of African American historical past.
“This ebook was a technique to protect this almost-erased a part of historical past,” stated Smilios throughout her Q&A with present Columbia nursing college students. Smilios defined how she is utilizing her work to spotlight an necessary a part of historical past and rejoice the legacy of the Black Angels. The ebook particulars their bravery and spirit in treating TB sufferers.
In 2015, Smilios was working as a contract developmental editor for Springer Science+ Enterprise Media and enhancing a ebook on uncommon lung ailments. She got here throughout a line about Sea View and the creation of the remedy for tuberculosis. The road led to the work of Edward Robitzek, the physician who spearheaded the primary TB drug trials with isoniazid.
Smilios reached out to Allen, and so they met in a restaurant in Harlem Hospital, the place she listened to Allen’s highly effective testimony. Allen advised Smilios there was no recorded historical past of the Sea View because it closed its doorways in 1961.
“I used to be subsequent invited into Ms. Allen’s house in Staten Island,” stated Smilios. Allen lives in one of many former nurses’ residences, now a non-public retirement house referred to as Park Lane at Sea View. Her fourth-floor house is on the exact same flooring the place she resided within the Nineteen Forties.
“Ms. Allen invited me over to her house quite a few instances, and I recorded hours of dialog for analysis for this ebook,” stated Smilios. “I additionally contacted the son of Dr. Robtizek, John Robitzek. He would spend hours speaking about his father—who he was as an individual, and what he did for medication.”
Within the Q&Part of the dialogue, Butts requested what got here subsequent within the story of the Black Angels. This led to the thrilling announcement of an exhibition that’s presently in progress on the Staten Island Museum (Cosy Harbor).
The Black Angels are the premise for the exhibition, “Taking Care,” which is able to open for public viewing beginning on Saturday, Jan. 27, 2024, with a reception. The exhibition will show the legacy of the Black nurses at Sea View Hospital; Smilios is on the scholar advisory panel. The exhibition will characteristic movies and artwork installations by artists Elissa Blount-Moorhead and Bradford Younger, connecting the contributions the Black Angels made to Black healthcare.
Earlier than ending the lecture with questions from the viewers, Allen was requested if there was going to be a comply with up ebook that she wrote. “I’m 92, and lived a wonderful life!” Allen replied. “After retiring from nursing in 1995, I moved on to working for the unions combating for nurse’s rights, and lots of different jobs. I really feel I may write a ebook in my very own phrases, we’ll see…” For extra details about the exhibition and the opening reception, ship an electronic mail to data@statenislandmuseum.org.
