The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis
Winner of the Christopher Award 2024
NPR Science Friday Best Summer Beach Reads 2024
Gotham Book Finalist 2024
NASW Science in Society Journalism Award Finalist 2024
PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize Finalist 2024
"An incredible story...the writing is phenomenal." —John Green, author of Everything Is Tuberculosis
New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage.
In the pre-antibiotic days when tuberculosis stirred people’s darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed sanatorium, dubbed “the pest house,” where it was said that “no one left alive.”
Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this remarkable true story follows the intrepid young women known by their patients as the “Black Angels.” For twenty years, they risked their lives working under appalling conditions while caring for New York’s poorest residents, who languished in wards, waiting to die, or became guinea pigs for experimental surgeries and often deadly drugs. But despite their major role in desegregating the New York City hospital system—and their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculosis at Sea View—these nurses were completely erased from history. The Black Angels recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this riveting story, celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival.
NPR Science Friday Best Summer Beach Reads 2024
Gotham Book Finalist 2024
NASW Science in Society Journalism Award Finalist 2024
PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize Finalist 2024
"An incredible story...the writing is phenomenal." —John Green, author of Everything Is Tuberculosis
New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage.
In the pre-antibiotic days when tuberculosis stirred people’s darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed sanatorium, dubbed “the pest house,” where it was said that “no one left alive.”
Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this remarkable true story follows the intrepid young women known by their patients as the “Black Angels.” For twenty years, they risked their lives working under appalling conditions while caring for New York’s poorest residents, who languished in wards, waiting to die, or became guinea pigs for experimental surgeries and often deadly drugs. But despite their major role in desegregating the New York City hospital system—and their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculosis at Sea View—these nurses were completely erased from history. The Black Angels recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this riveting story, celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival.
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Community Reviews
What an incredible book! Such an important part of history and written in an engaging way that makes you want to keep going.
I only learned of this book through patches Instagram post. As a nurse, I love reading anything about medical issues, especially when it involves nursing heavily I bought the hard cover and the Kindle edition and highlighted so many things. I wrote in the hardcover so many things. This book read like a novel. It was both sad and inspiring. The things that nurse managers could get by with in those years would never fly today the patients and their stories. It was a great book.
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