1956

Andre Cournand and Dickinson Richards win (with Werner Forssmann) Nobel Prize in Medicine for work in cardiac catheterization; they were part of Columbia’s First Division at Bellevue, which ran the Chest Service, where they had worked together since ‘30s. News of the prize was “a tremendous coup for Bellevue,” though it came when Richards was attacking Bellevue for “abysmal conditions in the TB wards” (Oshinsky, 238-41, 245). Structural and financial plight of Bellevue beginning in ‘50s, owing to, inter alia, exodus of tax paying whites to suburbs (including NJ), appeal of better housing, cars, escaping poor blacks and PRs crowding into NY, expansion of insurers like BC that made semiprivate rooms in voluntary hospitals possible (249). Medicare and Medicaid led to steep patient decline in NYC public hospitals. In 1966, Columbia left Bellevue; only NYC medical school remained (252-3). Federal loans and billions borrowed from union pension funds saved NYC from default in 1976. New 25-story building at Bellevue made it under the wire and was begun in 1973, replacing old-style wards with 4-to-a-room semi private rooms (per Medicare guideline) (257-58). In 1980s, Bellevue became an AIDS factory, with medical students and residents working “in a climate of such relentless gloom” in which AIDS “saturated our training” (266-69). By mid-80s, 5% of public hospitals were treating 50% of nation’s AIDS patients, most in CA and especially NY (270).