The Black Angels

October 2, 2023
In her evocative debut, essayist Smilios tells the story of the Black nurses at Staten Island’s Seaview Hospital, which, during its heyday in the 1940s and ’50s, was the largest tuberculosis sanitarium run by a city government in the U.S. She focuses on the Black Southern nurses who were recruited to work there starting in 1929 after a mass resignation of white nurses due to poor working conditions and fear of the disease (at the time, tuberculosis killed one in seven people). Smilios profiles individual nurses, some of whom worked in the ward for more than 20 years, against a detailed historical backdrop, including the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North and the work done by the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses to garner respect and professional opportunities for its members. After WWII, the narrative shifts to the discovery of the antibiotic isoniazid and its trial as a cure for tuberculosis at Seaview, which was administered by the hospital’s Black nurses. Smilios’s narrative is sympathetically told in rich if sometimes flowery prose. (In one passage set in the surgery theater, Smilios describes “lungs whose surface resembled the moon, full of craters and rims” and the stench from corpses rising “like an invisible dark matter.”) Historical fiction aficionados will want to take a look.

June 10, 2024

Essayist Smilios's remarkable debut tells the story of the courageous Black nurses who worked at Staten Island's Seaview Hospital at the height of the mid-20th-century tuberculosis epidemic. She interweaves well-researched medical history with intimate descriptions of the nurses' experiences, creating a vivid portrait of the tuberculosis crisis. Many people sought treatment at the hospital, but no cure was available. When faced with poor working conditions and the real possibility of becoming infected themselves, white nurses quit in droves. Their places were filled by Black nurses recruited from the South, who were promised good pay and an education. Narrator Gina Daniels infuses Smilios's rich prose with resonance and feeling, communicating the fraught circumstances of women who battled racism and sexism along with the relentless scourge of contagion. With impeccable pacing, Daniels deftly navigates between the women's personal stories and the roller coaster of scientific progress, capturing the hope, disappointment, and frustrations underlying this troubling time. VERDICT Meticulous research paired with exceptional narration makes this timely account of a public health emergency, labor shortage, and enduring discrimination an essential addition to all nonfiction collections.--Christa Van Herreweghe

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