In 1929, in Savannah, Georgia, Edna Sutton dreamed of being a nurse.
But as a young black woman, she had few opportunities in her hometown, which was still governed by Jim Crow laws.
The only nursing she could do was visit the black settlements on the outskirts of the city, providing what home help she could to sick patients in wooden huts.
So she headed to New York, where there was a widespread shortage of nurses.
In the midst of the tuberculosis epidemic, young white women were leaving the countryside in droves in search of less dangerous opportunities.
The city recruited young black women from the Deep South to fill the void.
They were offered a salary, free housing, and paid tuition at one of the city’s two black nursing schools in exchange for work on the city’s hospital wards, especially the most dangerous ones, such as the Sea View Sanitarium in Staten. Island.
“Black nurses ran the wards,” says Dr. Edward Robitzek, Sea View’s longtime director, in Maria Smilios’ new book “The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis.” ” (GP Putnam’s Sons, available now). “They helped cure tuberculosis and close this hospital.”
The book portrays the challenges black nurses faced in caring for seriously ill hospital patients while being excluded by State Island’s white residents, and how they ultimately helped end the epidemic.
In the early 20th century, New York City was decimated by tuberculosis.
The Lower East Side was called “the place of disease.”
Its roughly 2 million immigrants were crammed into cramped housing in blocks nicknamed “The Morgue” or “Lung Alley,” which writer Jacob Riis called “fever-generating structures.”
Historically, the city quarantined its sick (in places like the Asylum for the Blind, the New York City Lunatic Asylum, the Asylum for Idiots, the Hospital for the Incurable, and the Smallpox Hospital) and did the same with highly contagious “lungs” or “consumptives”. affected by tuberculosis.
Sea View was the city’s largest sanatorium, opened in 1913 to keep the infected away from the general population.
It worked, and the city’s tuberculosis death rate fell from 10% to 5% in 1920.
Sutton was one of the first black nurses at Sea View.
She and her colleagues were grateful for the opportunity to work as full-time nurses, but still found Sea View a desolate place.
With no cure for tuberculosis, desperate patients taking the “rest cure” could do nothing but sit and suffer.
“They sweated, moaned and screamed; They coughed, choked, and spat blood, each blow sending swarms of live germs into the chamber pots and sheets. . . walls and nightstands,” writes Smilios.
Tuberculosis patients had to deal with boredom and isolation, poor nutrition, and violence, leading many Sea View residents to depression and suicide.
Death was a constant, and the patients themselves made macabre bets on who would be called “the Bone Man” next.
“No one ever recovers at Sea View,” Smilios quotes a hospital administrator. “We are in the business of dying,” another agreed.
Black nurses did what they could to alleviate suffering, bathing and shaving patients, cleaning and drying them, emptying chamber pots.
They took urine and sputum samples, recorded temperatures and pulses, doing everything they could to keep patients comfortable and doctors informed.
They were also heavily involved in administering treatments, whether experimental medications or experimental surgeries.
Sutton became a surgical nurse and assisted doctors in the brutal operations they hoped would alleviate patients’ suffering, including pneumothorax surgery (puncturing the lung with a long needle) and thoracoplasty (cutting off a piece of the lung).
However, if those surgeries went wrong, doctors too often blamed Sutton and her colleagues, calling black nurses “saboteurs” or “careless.”
They suffered other indignities.
Black nurses were discouraged from buying homes on Staten Island (“not on my block,” was the local rallying cry), threatened with letters from the KKK and at least one burned cross.
In 1942, a Nazi prisoner of war housed at Sea View told the nurse who cared for him for more than a year that he “hated black people,” then spit on her and said he “hoped she would get sick.”
Meanwhile, no black nurse received a promotion or pay raise during the first three years Sutton worked there. Many were infected with tuberculosis and were forced to work without masks or gowns.
When the time came in the mid-1950s to conduct a massive human trial on a new drug that could cure tuberculosis called isoniazid, researcher Herbert Fox of the Hoffman-LaRoche company needed many patients from diverse backgrounds with different variations of the disease.
He found all of that at Sea View and therefore chose it to host his trial, largely also because of the extensive experience of Edna Sutton and her black co-workers.
“No one was more qualified than these nurses to help. . . with a trial of this magnitude,” writes Smilios.
Isoniazid proved to be a very effective tool to combat the disease.
“Alone and in combination with other drugs. . . [isoniazid] Not only was it safe but it was almost 95% effective in guaranteeing patient survival,” Smilios writes.
Today, tuberculosis has not been completely eradicated from the Earth, but isoniazid has greatly reduced its effects. Since 2000, drug therapy has saved an estimated 66 million lives worldwide.
As for those “Black Angels,” the Sea View nurses were so helpful in treating tuberculosis patients and returning them safely home that in 1961 the center was closed.
“Ironically,” Smilios writes, those women “had probably lost their jobs.”
