Bellevue may be the only municipal hospital in the country to have a literary review. It has attracted well-known writers despite not paying its contributors. The review has published poems by Philip Levine, David Lehman and Sharon Olds. There is also a poem by Julia Alvarez called “Bellevue,” which reads, “My mother used to say that she’d end up/ at Bellevue if we didn’t all behave.” More
For more than 200 years, as America’s oldest public hospital, Bellevue Hospital Center has seen the gamut of human experience and emotion. Birth and death, healing and sickness, bliss and agony are daily occurrences. More
Our first stop was the morgue. The cavernous walk-in refrigerator was icy and silent. Here were the unclaimed bodies, mostly elderly men from the streets. The ones that were never identified, never claimed, went to our anatomy lab. More
(Just for fun, here’s my first ever ‘publication’ in the New York Times: a letter I wrote as a medical student, after the death of a PBS icon of my childhood.) More