A Fight Unfinished: The Legacy of Tuberculosis | Think Global Health
Writer and advocate Maria Smilios urges the global community to not lose sight of TB
Featuring distinguished author, Maria Smilios speaking on her book The Black Angels; The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis.
The Black Angels
recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this riveting story celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival.
In her first book, Smilios paints an indelible portrait of an era when this untreatable bane killed one American every 11 minutes. Others have covered this territory before. But this account breaks new ground by recovering the forgotten heroics of a corps of Black women who stepped into a void that no one else would fill. ~ New York Times Book Review
During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed 1 in 7 people white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed facility, dubbed “the pest house” where “no one left alive.”
'Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this story follows the intrepid young women, the “Black Angels,” who, for twenty years, risked their lives working under dreadful conditions while caring for the city’s poorest
—1,800 souls languishing in wards, waiting to die or become “guinea pigs” for experimental (often deadly) drugs. Yet despite their major role in desegregating the NYC hospital system .... these nurses were completely erased from history.'