The House of the Poor

"Luyhx" was a Finn, with a strong weakness for whiskey. After a terrific binge, lasting several weeks, an ambulance rushed him to Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital. He was comatose from alcohol, and he had a compound fracture of a leg. He guessed later he must have tumbled, or maybe been kicked, down a stairway somewhere. During his three-week binge Luyhx had eaten practically nothing, and his system was so starved that no immediate surgery could be thought of. After several days it was obvious that only amputation of his leg would save his life. Bellevue's Social Service Department scraped up $165 to buy (wholesale) an artificial leg, and eventually Luyhx hobbled off. Soon he was back, drunk again, with a new break in the amputated leg, above the knee-stump. The artificial leg was missing. Luyhx at first claimed he had lost it, later admitted he had hocked it for $15, to buy whiskey.

This tale is typical of the dozens told with gusto in Bellevue (Julian Messner; $2.50), published this week by Mrs. Lorraine Maynard, a pretty, risible free-lance writer. She wrote it in collaboration with Dr. Laurence Miscall, associate visiting surgeon at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital, who is especially interested in chest surgery, diabetes, frostbite, gastrointestinal tumors, and human nature. Dr. Miscall once operated on Mrs. Maynard's husband. Thereafter she did volunteer work at Bellevue, got the idea for her book.

Bellevue is not only one of the biggest but probably the most notorious municipal hospital in the U. S. It is best known to tabloid readers as the place where many sordid metropolitan melodramas reach their end. It is also a place where poor people can get complete medical service for very little ($1 to $5 a day) or, if they cannot pay, for nothing. Bellevue, though laboriously breezy and cliche-ridden, gives a thoroughgoing picture of the place--a smell of lysol; a babble of dialects and foreign tongues; tin benches (to discourage lice) in the clinic waiting rooms; tenement mothers cursing their offspring like truck drivers; dozing cops on guard at the bedsides of laid-up malefactors; a sign in the Accident Ward: DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING UNLESS THE NURSE SAYS IT IS ALL RIGHT FOR YOU TO DO SO.

A century ago Bellevue was a filthy, hellish pesthouse for typhus and yellow fever; 50 years ago a dumping ground for drunken bums, bastards, lunatics, penniless incurables. Fear of the place is still widespread among New York City's ignorant poor, especially the foreign-born.

Today Bellevue is a $23,000,000 plant, a group of 17 buildings, staffed by 231 interns and resident physicians, 660 visiting doctors, 543 student nurses, 980 graduate nurses. It costs the city some $5,000,-ooo a year. In 1939 there were 68,485 admissions; 14,092 operations; 29,106 ambulance calls (only cops can summon Bellevue ambulances); 640,012 laboratory reports; 268,000 prescriptions. The hospital's daily population varies from 2,000 to 3,000.

Even when patients are not afraid of the hospital, they are often terrified of operations, commonly referred to as "cuttin'." The law requires that a patient's written permission--an X scribbled on the form will do--must be had before operating. Author Maynard tells of a Pole named Ciesielski who landed in Bellevue badly in need of surgery but not in good enough shape for an immediate operation. The doctor in charge ordered four transfusions in two days--$160 worth of free blood. On the third morning, hopped up by his new blood, Ciesielski thumped his chest, said he felt fine, was going home. The doctor resorted to subterfuge. He told Ciesielski that he could go if he insisted--but in that case he would have to give back the blood for a patient who really needed it. Ciesielski thereupon submitted to "cuttin'."

The almost incredible insensitivity to pain of comatose drunks is a matter for endless wonder at Bellevue. One souse was brought in with his back badly burned in curious parallel stripes. He had gone to sleep in the cellar of a building, propped up against a radiator. When heat was turned on in the morning, the radiator seared his back without waking him up. Another man went to a rented room with a friend, a dog, four quarts of whiskey. When he reached Bellevue three days later his arm was chewed to the bone. He thought it must have been the dog. But when the doctor minutely examined what was left of the arm, he said that it had been eaten away by rats.

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