This book is a history of a community, and, moreover, a history by that community. In January, 2007, Jeannine Turgeon began to recruit a committee of Bellevue Park neighbors, volunteers who would be willing to produce a book about their neighborhood in honor of its 100th anniversary. Initial members were Clark and Vickie Bucher, Dan Deibler and Elizabeth Johnson, Chris Dick, Frank Haas, Hannah Leavitt, Carol Lopus, Mo Lynn, Bonnie Mark, Debbie Nifong, Peggy and Dan Purdy, John Quimby, Sue Ellen Ramer, Olivia Susskind, Doris Ulsh, Phil and Mary Walsh, Mary Warner, and Gretchen Yarnall. Prof. Michael Barton of Penn State Harrisburg was invited to serve as a consultant and general editor for the project, and we selected Xlibris as our publisher. In these early months, outlines were organized and re-organized, topics were proposed and discarded, and suggestions of all sorts were submitted and accepted or reluctantly retracted to fit within the publisher’s limits and the book’s budget.

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a riveting history of New York's iconic public hospital that charts the turbulent rise of American medicine. Bellevue Hospital, on New York City's East Side, occupies a colorful and horrifying place in the public imagination: a den of mangled crime victims, vicious psychopaths, assorted derelicts, lunatics, and exotic-disease sufferers. In its two and a half centuries of service, there was hardly an epidemic or social catastrophe—or groundbreaking scientific advance—that did not touch Bellevue. David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution. From its origins in 1738 as an almshouse and pesthouse, Bellevue today is a revered public hospital bringing first-class care to anyone in need. With its diverse, ailing, and unprotesting patient population, the hospital was a natural laboratory for the nation's first clinical research. It treated tens of thousands of Civil War soldiers, launched the first civilian ambulance corps and the first nursing school for women, pioneered medical photography and psychiatric treatment, and spurred New York City to establish the country's first official Board of Health. As medical technology advanced, "voluntary" hospitals began to seek out patients willing to pay for their care. For charity cases, it was left to Bellevue to fill the void. The latter decades of the twentieth century brought rampant crime, drug addiction, and homelessness to the nation's struggling cities—problems that called a public hospital's very survival into question. It took the AIDS crisis to cement Bellevue's enduring place as New York's ultimate safety net, the iconic hospital of last resort. Lively, page-turning, fascinating, Bellevue is essential American history.

The inspiration for the NBC drama New Amsterdam and in the spirit of Oliver Sacks, this intensely involving memoir from a former medical director of a major NYC hospital looks poignantly at patients' lives and reveals the author's own battle with cancer. Using the plights of twelve very different patients--from dignitaries at the nearby UN, to supermax prisoners at Riker's Island, to illegal immigrants, and Wall Street tycoons--Dr. Eric Manheimer "offers far more than remarkable medical dramas: he blends each patient's personal experiences with their social implications" (Publishers Weekly). Manheimer was not only the medical director of the country's oldest public hospital for over 13 years, but he was also a patient. As the book unfolds, the narrator is diagnosed with cancer, and he is forced to wrestle with the end of his own life even as he struggles to save the lives of others.

Bellevue received its French name, meaning "beautiful view," from fur trader Manuel Lisa as he stood high atop a hill, looking out at the scenic Missouri River Valley before him, or so the legend goes. Two hundred years after Lisa's proclamation, Bellevue has grown to become a sprawling metropolis proudly recognized as the third largest city in Nebraska. However, the story could have ended long before this. Bellevue was originally supposed to serve as an important railroad thoroughfare and as the first capital of the Nebraska Territory. Neither of these ultimately happened. Yet, Bellevue has persevered onwards and upwards. From its origins as little more than a trading post for westward travelers and Native Americans, to serving as the headquarters for the former Strategic Air Command at the onset of the modern jet age, Bellevue has taken a remarkable journey.