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New York - New York City - Bellevue Hospital 1st Ave. to East River, 26th to 30th St. IRT Lexington Ave. subway (local) to 28th St.; or 3d Ave. el to 28th St.; or 2d Ave. el to 23d St.; or 1st Ave. bus to 26th St. One of the twenty-six municipal institutions under the supervision of the Department of Hospitals, Bellevue is the oldest general hospital on the North American continent. Probably no other hospital in the world admits so many patients and treats such a diversity of ailments. Contagious cases, however, are transferred to the near-by Willard Parker Hospital. A city complete in itself, Bellevue covers approximately twelve square city blocks. Its twentyfive buildings contain 102 wards and cost more than twenty-three million dollars. The massive eight-story Psychiatric Hospital at the northwest corner, of clean red brick trimmed with natural gray stone, exemplifies the hospital's program of modernization. Bellevue serves a heavily populated area of the East Side between East Houston and Forty-second Streets, east of Sixth Avenue. Hospitalization, medical care, and clinical treatment are provided without cost to anyone who is unable to pay for them, investigation as to ability to pay being made after, and not before, admission is granted and treatment begun. Bellevue is a free, not a charity, hospital, and according to a city law, it must accept any applicant who resides in its district and requires medical treatment. The ambulance service operates on a twenty-four-hour basis, and an ambulance and doctor can be dispatched within thirty seconds after a call for aid has been received. Bellevue's morgue, the official mortuary for New York County, is in the Pathological Building on Twenty-ninth Street. The same building also houses the Medical Examiner's office, where New York's official autopsies are performed, and the headquarters of the Mortuary Division of the city Department of Hospitals. About twenty thousand bodies pass each year through Bellevue's morgue, eighty-five hundred of which are never claimed. All unclaimed bodies are photographed and described, and a docket entered for them at the Police Department's Bureau of Missing Persons. After reposing for two weeks or more in refrigerated vaults of the morgue, some of the cadavers are given to private embalming schools whose students practice in a room adjoining the vaults, and a certain number are allotted to medical schools for dissection. The remainder, about 170 a week, are placed in plain, wooden coffins and carried on a barge, up the East River to Potter's Field on Hart's Island. In the new Psychiatric Hospital, the alcoholics, the sexually unbalanced, the hysterical, and the alleged insane are under care. The Psychiatric Division of Bellevue has become a laboratory for the medical and social-service professions in the United States. The "disturbed," or violent, wards utilize none of the old-fashioned, inhumane methods that some hospitals still employ for pacifying psychotics. Though overcrowding detracts from the desired effect, the new building, with its pleasant murals, minimizes the sense of confinement. The medical departments of three outstanding universities are affiliated with Bellevue: Columbia, Cornell, and New York. A fourth group of doctors and internes not connected with these particular schools is included in an open division. Bellevue's staff doctors, internes, and clinic physicians are, for the most part, either faculty members of these schools or regular hospital employees who are selected by the schools. New York Training School for Nursing, established in 1873 by Bellevue, was the first of its kind in the United States. Its standards have since served as a norm for other schools. The hospital also maintains the Mills Training School for Male Nurses. Bellevue's list of contributions to medicine is a long and notable one. Its ambulance service, inaugurated on a horse-and-buggy basis in 1869, was the first in the world. Doctors Valentine Mott, James R. Wood, William H. Van Buren and F. H. Hamilton brought the hospital fame through their medical and surgical discoveries. At Bellevue, Dr. Herman Biggs founded the first bacteriological laboratory in the United States, Dr. Lewis A. Sayre pioneered in orthopedics, and Dr. William H. Welch established America's first pathological laboratory. Noted graduates include Dr. William S. Halstead, who first used cocaine as an anesthetic; Dr. Frank Harley, inventor of the electrical surgical saw; Dr. William H. Gorgas and Dr. Jesse W. Lazear who, with Dr. Walter Reed and others, discovered how yellow fever was transmitted, and eradicated the disease from Cuba and Panama. Bellevue's history goes back to British New York in 1736, when the city corporation ordered the construction of a "Publick Workhouse and House of Correction" on the site of the present City Hall Park. Infirmary activities were confined to a single room with six beds. To accommodate ever increasing numbers of the needy, new buildings were erected, until by 1811 the hospital section of the workhouse had become its largest department. When further expansion became imperative, Belle Vue Farm, the present site of the hospital, was purchased ( 1816), and the new group of buildings became known as Bellevue Establishment. Constant increase in population and resultant clinical demands on the hospital during the nineteenth century necessitated frequent additions to and renovations of the plant. Modern Bellevue began in 1908, when it became a part of the "Bellevue and Allied Hospitals." In 1929 the Department of Hospitals of the City of New York was created, with Bellevue as one of its units. Under the spur of PWA and WPA grants, added to city appropriations, the old Bellevue, with its maze of mid-Victorian buildings of ominous gray, has given.place to the group of eight-story structures of brick and stone with granite foundations. The firm of McKim, Mead, and White designed these new buildings with the exception of the Psychiatric Hospital; the architects of the latter were C. B. Meyers and Thompson, Holmes, and Converse. In February, 1938, the C & D Building was opened as a model unit for the treatment of pulmonary diseases. When the new Administration Building is erected, it will complete the group of seven great units making up the new Bellevue. Architecturally, there is a deliberate suppression, on the exterior, of the functional differences between the various elements and parts of the buildings. The interiors, in contrast, are designed as frank expressions of their uses and of the materials employed, with reliance for effect placed upon tasteful proportioning and choice of color. The walls of the buildings have been decorated with the murals executed under the auspices of the WPA Federal Art Project. Bellevue, like all large municipal hospitals, is still to some extent the object of fear and rumor, for in handling vast numbers of humanity's underprivileged it naturally has a high death rate. Almost vanished, however, are such once popular superstitions among the poor as that of the "Black Bottle," used to do away with troublesome patients. In the past, charges of unsanitary conditions, a depleted commissary, political graft, and inadequate care by nurses and orderlies had considerable basis in fact. Scadalous conditions at the hospital -- lack of supplies and often food, vicious surroundings, and untrained female prisoners acting as nurses -- contributed to a frightful mortality during the cholera plague of 1832, when more than thirty-five hundred New Yorkers died of the disease and a very few who entered Bellevue recovered. Again, the Civil War all but demoralized the work of the hospital. The school for nurses was established after an investigation by public-spirited women disclosed that the nurses "were nearly without exception to the last degree incompetent. . . ." The pesthouse and prison atmosphere of Bellevue's past has been obliterated. Through the years the hospital has steadily improved, and today it ranks as one of the best medical centers in the world. To the average New Yorker, Bellevue Hospital is a reassuring symbol of man's humanity to man. To the poor of the East Side, admission to the hospital often represents a dividing line between illness and good health, life and death. Overcrowding and understaffing continue to be the chief difficulties. The new buildings have done much to remedy crowding, but it remains a vital problem to the hospital, which must receive all comers even though it is forced to put up cots in the corridors. Understaffing has been mitigated by substantial additions to the staff in .