America's oldest public hospital began as a two-storey almshouse in 1736
Bellevue grew from New York's first permanent almshouse and a farm used to quarantine yellow fever victims. Along the way it racked up a startling list of American firsts, from nursing and emergency care to intelligence testing, and became so linked with psychiatry that its name turned into city slang for an asylum.
The story starts in 1736 with a brick almshouse built on common land where City Hall Park lies today. In 1798 municipal authorities bought Belle Vue farm by the East River, then several miles beyond the built-up town, where the sick had been isolated during yellow fever outbreaks, and the institution took the name Bellevue Hospital in 1824. Teaching began early: Columbia faculty and students worked there from as early as 1787 for 181 years, and in 1861 Bellevue Hospital Medical College became New York's first medical school tied directly to a hospital.
The nineteenth century brought one pioneering service after another. Bellevue opened the country's first nursing school run on Florence Nightingale's principles in 1873, its first children's clinic in 1874 and its first emergency pavilion in 1876. A dedicated pavilion for psychiatric patients followed in 1879, a radical idea then, and the reason the hospital's name became shorthand for mental institutions. Its physicians introduced the hypodermic syringe to the United States in 1856, helped write the city's 1866 sanitary code, described as the world's first, and in 1889 were first to report that tuberculosis could be prevented.
Discoveries continued into modern medicine. William Tillett found streptokinase in 1933, later used to dissolve clots in heart attacks. In 1940 Andre Cournand and Dickinson Richards set up the world's first cardiopulmonary laboratory there, and the hospital later produced the first cadaver kidney transplant in 1967 and early active immunisation against hepatitis B. The psychologist David Wechsler, chief psychologist from 1932 to 1967, created intelligence scales that by the 1960s had overtaken the Stanford-Binet in popularity.
Today Bellevue is a safety net hospital, treating anyone regardless of insurance or means, and more than 80 percent of its patients come from underserved communities. Its 25-storey tower holds over 800 beds, and it logs nearly 106,000 emergency visits a year. It has weathered crises too, evacuating patients after Hurricane Sandy flooded its basement in 2012 and caring for an Ebola patient in 2014. The NBC drama New Amsterdam is set in a thinly disguised version of it.
Source: Bellevue Hospital
