The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

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. (Sept.)