Medicine: At Bellevue

The scene at the admitting ward of New York’s Bellevue Hospital is one that haunts prowlers about the city. Mansard windows look down from a great grey building at a quadrangle dismal even in daytime. Four or five ambulances are always in the court; the ambulance surgeons (hospital internes in wrinkled white) fidgeting in and out of the admitting ward.

The ward has the smell of soiled bandages, disinfectants and decay. It was opened in 1869 when New York established the first ambulanceservice in the U. S. Its building, for decades muggy and stuffy, is older. De Witt Clinton, onetime (1803-15) Mayor of New York, laid the cornerstone in 1811. Grass spread about it then; the East River was a pleasant prospect. Now all is grime and noise.

No one knows how many sick, mangled and dead people have been brought into the admitting ward. Since 1902 the number has been 1,442,747. Another 1,750,000 have gone in for minor injuries. When an amateur writer shot Novelist David Graham Phillips in 1911, an ambulance took the body from a sidewalk near the old Princeton club and carried it to the admitting ward.

Last week the ward was empty. Hospital officials had opened a spick & span one in a new building on the quadrangle.* They hunted a key to fasten the doors. There was no key. The doors during 58 years had never been locked.

*One by one the city is replacing Bellevue’s buildings with new ones properly equipped.