New strain of coronaviruses

[Wayfaring Stranger]

Any plans to stop the financial rape of the world or is $75T/ 100 years  the going price for self enslavement?

 

The early hospitals loved to disappear the homeless and terminally ill. Why would they not be doing the very same thing since the 'good old days'?

 

https://www.thrillist.com/health/nation/bellevue-hospital-nyc-psych-ward-crazy-true-stories-history

It was a public hospital that really attracted some of the greatest medical minds of three centuries, because they believed it was their duty to help the poor. They believed that they were going to see everything at Bellevue, there was no disease, no condition that they weren’t going to see.

"My mother would say, 'Keep it up and you're going to Bellevue.' It was like a national punch line."

And, frankly, they could basically experiment on uncomplaining bodies. These were people who -- the deal was that if they came to Bellevue, the doctors who treated them would look toward advancing medical science. The doctors weren't doing Frankenstein work on them, they were actually trying to push the envelope of medical discovery forward. But that basically was part of the deal.

So I think the answer is, this is where the poor came, this is where the immigrants came, and with the immigrants came all kinds of afflictions. And a tradition grew out of that.

Given the hygienic conditions in the 1800s, particularly for immigrants, it makes sense that they'd be the biggest patient group at Bellevue.
Oshinsky: If you were sick in 1850, if you had any money at all, the doctor came to your house, you didn’t go to the hospital. Hospitals were these really down-and-out kinds of places. But what made Bellevue different was that it was a down-and-out kind of place that had amazing physicians working there.

"Fifty percent of everyone who was operated on at Bellevue died within a month."

There were other moments in Bellevue's history, obviously the AIDS crisis was extraordinary, and Bellevue was the epicenter of the AIDS crisis in New York City, which was the greatest AIDS crisis in the country. More patients were sent to Bellevue, more AIDS patients died at Bellevue than anywhere else.

A lot of the house staff were very frightened of treating people who were going to die, and they didn't know if they were infectious, these were very young patients who were no older than the interns and residents who worked at Bellevue. It was emotionally draining, and it was scary. But they prevailed as physicians, and these patients were treated with incredible compassion.

 

You can't factor out Bellevue as a psychiatric hospital. When I was growing up as a kid in New York City, when I was acting weird my mother would say, "Keep it up and you're going to Bellevue." It was like a national punch line.

When so many people you meet think Bellevue is only a psychiatric hospital, that's part of it. But what I try to show in the book, was that's why it's reputation has meant a lot more; it's actually a rather small part of the larger operation.

Bellevue was also a teaching hospital, and before anesthesia, there would be people screaming and bleeding out for student doctors to see. How exactly did that work?
Oshinsky: Basically if you had to amputate before 1845, you had to get that limb off within seconds, or no more than a minute, or the patient would die of shock and blood loss. It would be absolute agony.

They would actually ask the patient when the patient came onto the table, "Do you want us to do this procedure?" If the patient said no, they would take the patient off, and if the patient said yes, they would start. Regardless of what the patient said afterwards, it didn’t matter, that operation would continue to happen.

"She really wanted to reach kids... and she thought electric shock was the answer."

It was purposefully held in a part of the hospital where the screams could not be heard. They would give the patient a little whiskey and maybe put a rag in the person's mouth, and they would go ahead and do what they had to do. It was barbaric, absolutely barbaric.

Bellevue had a lot [of amputations], as the city began to grow there [were] industrial accidents, people losing limbs, falling off, infections. This went on quite frequently at Bellevue, and without anesthesia, doctors, surgeons who were performing these operations would become nauseous themselves. Some of them would walk away from the operating room, sometimes they couldn't go through with it.

There's one part in my book where they take a limb off a young boy with his father holding him down, and at the end of the operation, the father [got sick]. On the other hand, according to the Bellevue doctors, the boy was just fine, his life had been saved.

But the extreme methods didn't end with amputations, right? Electroshock therapy was also used at Bellevue.