[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Thanks to everyone who came out last night to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library at the New York Public Library for our Get Lit with All Of It conversation with Michael Cunningham about his book Day and with our musical guest Josh Ritter. It was a fantastic evening. Those two, charm-palooza, let me tell you. Also, really authentic and earnest audience had terrific questions. Thanks to everybody who participated.

Also, I just want to say personally, thanks to folks who came up to see how I was doing after my surgery. You must have Spidey sense. It's six months today. I'm doing well, so you're stuck with me. There you go. By the way, if you weren't able to be there, and you weren't able to stream it, the radio edit will be happening on the air on the show Monday at 1:00 PM February 5th. If you've been to one of our Get Lit events, you know there really is a special time. There's a great energy in the room.

If you haven't, I hope you'll join us this month. Our next Get Lit with All Of It book club is happening on Wednesday, February 28th. I will be in conversation with author Tananarive Due about her novel, The Reformatory. It combines the real-life terrifying facts about an infamous school in Florida with an unsettling, supernatural vibe. NPR called the book one of the best novels published in 2023. We agree with our friends at NPR. Excuse me. Our special musical guest is Jake Blount.

He's an acclaimed singer-songwriter and banjo player and a rising scholar of folk and African American music. You, New Yorkers, can borrow an e-copy of The Reformatory and get tickets to our February 20th event with her starting, I think it's today, right? Mark your calendars for February 28th. Go to wnyc.org/getlit or follow us on Instagram @allofitwnyc. You can find the links there. That is in all of our futures. Right now, let's kick off All Of It's Black History Month coverage.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: You and Me]

Alison Stewart: Today is the first day of Black History Month, and this month on the show, we are celebrating the legacies of Black New Yorkers from boldface names to those who have been overlooked. We start with the latter today. A new exhibit at the Staten Island Museum recognizes African American nurses, who in the early 20th century worked at Seaview Hospital on Staten Island. They were vital in assisting with the discovery of a breakthrough treatment for the deadly disease tuberculosis. They were called the Black Angels, and one of them is my guest today.

At the time, Sea View was one of the few New York hospitals in which Black nurses were allowed to work. The conditions were dangerous because many TB patients were there. Some white nurses didn't want to take the job and expose their health. Due to discrimination in our city's hospital system, Black nurses in New York didn't have the luxury of choice. Before we get to our conversation about the exhibit and hear from Virginia Allen, one of the last surviving Black Angel nurses, we want you to know there's also a recently released book that chronicles the achievements of these nurses.

Author Maria Smilios' book is called Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses who Helped Cure Tuberculosis. She joined us last fall to talk about her research, some of which is featured in this exhibit. Before we get to talking about the museum's exhibit, we're going to play about a three-minute snippet of my conversation with Maria to get some more context on the contributions of the Black Angel nurses. Here's Maria telling us more about the doctors involved with finding this breakthrough treatment and how the nurses played a key role.

Maria Smilios: Dr. Robitzek came to Sea View as a celebrated doctor who had an illustrious future, and it was shocking to people why he would want to come to this hospital way up on a hill in Staten Island instead of going to any other hospital that he could have gone to and worked. The reason he came was because his father had died of tuberculosis. He came from a wealthy family. He saw how his father has treated. His father was sent to Saranac Lake. It struck him that there were a lot of health disparities. He wanted to devote his life to finding a cure for TB, and so he put himself in Sea View, in the midst of the biggest municipal sanatorium in the city.

He came to Seaview as a pathologist because he believed that you had to learn the disease internally before you could begin to treat it. Robitzek didn't really find the cure per se. The drug was developed by Hoffmann-La Roche. What Robitzek did was he facilitated the cure, and the nurses executed it.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask, how did the Black Angels play into it? When did they come into the story?

Maria Smilios: In 1951, Hoffmann-La Roche called Sea View Hospital, called Dr. Robitzek. Actually, they called his partner, Selikoff. They said to him, "Hey, you know that drug we've been testing on mice? Well, it looks good. Do you want to test it on humans?" It had never before been tested on human beings. Two days of meetings ensued. "Yes," they said. Robitzek and Selikoff were put in charge of executing this-- What one journalist called the most grandiose human experiment in medical history.

The first trials for isoniazid on human beings. The nurses were called in to work the front lines because they knew the ebb and flow of tuberculosis, its nuances. They knew the arrogance of the disease, how it gnawed at the body, how it attacked, the moods of patients, their psyche. It was called consumption. It consumed you literally, but it also consumed you holistically as well. They knew that one day somebody could be well, and the next day they could hemorrhage. They also knew these patients. Most of the patients had been at Seaview for a minimum of a year, but many had been there three to five years. The first five trial patients were called "lungers."

One of the girls, Hilda, had been there for five straight years. She was 20 years old. The criteria was death had to be imminent. The nurses knew Hilda. They knew her disease. They knew every time she came in and stayed a year and a half. What they did was they were tasked to administer the drug, and then they took all these meticulous notes which at the end of the day, Robitzek collected and he went with Selikoff, and they looked through them, and they began writing downside effects, and they saw how many patients had side effects and what the side effects were. They saw how it affected their physical BA, how they started gaining weight. They saw their moods become elevated. This was all tasked on the nurses.

Alison Stewart: That was author Maria Smilios talking about her book Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses who Helped Cure Tuberculosis. Now, let's get the new Staten Island Museum exhibition. The show displays information about the nurses, many of whom have passed away, and the strong community that formed amidst the Black Angels. There are also archival materials from the hospital on view.

Taking Care, the Black Angels of Sea View Hospital is on view now at the Staten Island Museum. Earlier this week, I sat down with curators Rylee Eterginoso and Gabriella Leone and Virginia Allen, a Black Angel herself, who worked at Sea View for 10 years. I began by asking Virginia Allen, as an advisor to the exhibit what she wanted to make sure visitors to the museum understood about the history of the Black Angels.

Virginia Allen: That the nurses who worked at Sea View Hospital during the time of the tuberculosis outbreak which would be remembered since they are all deceased, and I am fortunate enough to be here to speak to you about it.

Alison Stewart: First of all, thank you for everything you've done.

Virginia Allen: It's been my pleasure.

Alison Stewart: Riley, what was the goal of the exhibition from a curator's standpoint?

Rylee Eterginoso: I think ultimately the the goal was really to turn up the volume on this story. I think that the story has been told, it's been told in the communities that the nurses built and their families, and so it was really just about turning up the volume.

Alison Stewart: Gabriella, let's talk about the history a little bit for people who don't know. The hospital, Sea View Hospital was opened in 1913. What' s the history of why and how the hospital opened?

Gabriella Leone: Tuberculosis was an epidemic in New York. It was I believe the second leading cause of death. New York City Department of Health was seeking a way to address this epidemic. Staten Island was an attractive place for this hospital because it was the least populous of the boroughs at the time. It had this reputation for fresh air. It was a resort community. It also had an institutional history.

There was a quarantine station on Staten Island in the early to mid-1800s, where all of the ships that entered New York Harbor stopped and were checked for disease. The Foundling Hospital in New York had a summer retreat on the south shore of the island. It was attractive to the city because it was distant, so it was a place where people who were infectious could be separated from the rest of the population.

Also for the primary treatment at the time for tuberculosis was fresh air and sunshine. The hospital itself was constructed in such a way to maximize fresh air and sunshine, sun exposure. The time period we're talking about in the exhibition is a little later, from the 1930s through the 1960s, when the demographic of the staff at the hospital shifts. There's a nursing shortage that happens in the late '20s, early '30s, and the administrators decide to recruit Black nurses to fill that need for trained personnel.

Alison Stewart: Rylee, where were they recruiting these black nurses from?

Rylee Eterginoso: At first they were recruiting them locally through New York City hospitals, Lincoln School of Nursing and Harlem School for Nursing. Then when the nursing shortage continued, they opened up the call nationally. That's how the story connects to the great migration. Staten Island and New York City welcomed nurses from all over the United States.

Alison Stewart: Virginia, when and why did you get into nursing, even before Staten Island in the hospital?

Virginia Allen: I got into nursing because I admired my aunt who was a registered nurse at Sea View Hospital, and she encouraged me to go into nursing. I moved to Staten Island to live with her and go to nursing school, but I went to work at Sea View first.

Alison Stewart: What is it that you liked about the profession of nursing, Virginia?

Virginia: Helping others, caring for the sick, comforting people.

Alison Stewart: At this time, what were the conversations like between the nurses and between you and your family members given how deadly and how frightening tuberculosis was at the time?

Virginia Allen: At that time I was 16, quite young and unsophisticated. I did not really realize how detrimental tuberculosis was until I went to nursing school.

Alison Stewart: Once you understood it, how did you feel about being in the center of this?

Virginia Allen: I enjoyed my job. It was the first job I've ever had. I didn't have any negative feelings toward it. I work with children, which is different from adults who were gravely ill. We had some sick children, but the majority of the children were up and about, and they didn't show signs of illness. They were children of patients who were confined to the adult wards, most of them.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing a new exhibit at the Staten Island Museum, taking care the Black Angels of Sea View Hospital. It's open to the public now. My guests are nurse Virginia Allen, exhibit advisor and former Black Angel, as well as Rylee Eterginoso and Gabriella Leone, who are curators of the exhibition. Tell me about the research process of finding the names of these nurses, finding their stories, and how you wanted to tell their stories.

Gabriella Leone: The first set of names came from speaking to Virginia Allen, who's been an incredible and generous resource in this research process. Then census research has been invaluable. Each institution has its own census. Because nurses lived on Sea View's campus, they are listed as having lived there, so that's a broad resource. Obituary research, looking for nurses in the local newspaper or even in their hometown's local newspaper has yielded some information.

We're still trying to get this complete list of nurses' names. We have somewhat over 100 names so far, but we know that there are 300 or more nurses who worked at Sea View. A part of the exhibition is soliciting information from people who may visit and may have the name of a nurse who worked at Sea View while it was a tuberculosis hospital. We're hoping that we gain some more names through visitation.

Alison Stewart: Virginia, what was the relationship like with the nurses? What was the camaraderie like, the friendships like?

Virginia Allen: We were like one big family, aunts, very few male nurses, but we had quite a few male orderlies, and we worked as a team. That was how we really got the work done. Each one of us did a certain part of taking care of the patients. It was a wonderful setting. I learned a lot.

Alison Stewart: What's a lesson you learned there that you've always kept with you all your life?

Virginia Allen: I think sincerity, integrity, stewardship.

Alison Stewart: What was the relationship like between the nurses and the patients at Sea View?

Virginia Allen: A very warm, comforting, caring environment.

Alison Stewart: Nurses know what's up. My niece is a nurse. [laughs]

Virginia Allen: Yes, we do. You have to be a special kind of person to be a nurse.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing taking care of the Black Angels of Sea View Hospital. It's at the Staten Island Museum. My guests are exhibit advisor Virginia Allen, a former Black Angel. You're still a Black Angel, you're not a former Black Angel. As well as Rylee Eterginoso and Gabriella Leone, who are curators of the exhibition. What kind of archival material will people see when they go to the museum?

Rylee Eterginoso: They will see family heirlooms. They will see photographs. They will also see objects that thankfully Sea View had lent to us, too. Objects that nurses touched, worked with, that were in their own family archives. I also wanted to just bring up the importance of trust building as part of this whole process and the work that Maria Smilios did with the families that she worked with and how she also connected us with those families, the work that Gabby has done to connect with families, and also, especially Virginia Allen, who has also connected us with a lot of these nurses and their families. The importance of them being able to trust us with these family heirlooms and these precious objects that are of great importance to them and to the story.

Gabriella Leone: One of the nurses, Colleen Jennings Bennett, loaned her nurse's cap for the exhibition. She was a nurse at Sea View in the later years of the hospital, 1957 to 1958. We were showing her her cap from Bellevue School of Nursing. That's never been on exhibition before, and we just feel so fortunate that she allowed us to display it.

Alison Stewart: There's a logbook, I believe, somebody was telling me.

Gabriella Leone: Yes, there's a register of patients from Sea View's collection. They're fascinating documents because it's the admittance records. It's tracing most people's diagnosis is chronic pulmonary tuberculosis, but you learn about where they came from, their countries of origin, their parent's countries of origin. People came from all over the world. Because Sea View is a part of New York City, there are patients from Puerto Rico, from China, from Japan, from Italy, from Ireland, from Russia. It's reflective of the population of the city but really also of the world at the time.

Alison Stewart: Where have all these things been, these items, these logbooks, these nurse's caps, these records?

Rylee Eterginoso: A lot of them have been in the attics and the personal archives of families and also at Sea View Hospital itself. Another thing that visitors can expect is also the plethora of oral histories that we have in the exhibition as well. Hearing nurses in their own words speak about their experience as nurses at Sea View Hospital. We also have an oral history from Mamie Daniels, who was a patient at Seaview Hospital who was 17, going on 18, and talking about her time there, as well as our oral history with Virginia Allen and Ms. Colleen Bennett.

Alison Stewart: You're listening to my conversation about a new exhibit at the Staten Island Museum, taking care of the Black Angels of Sea View Hospital. My guests are Virginia Allen, exhibit advisor and a Black Angel who worked at the hospital for 10 years, as well as curators Rylee Eterginoso and Gabriella Leone. After the break, we'll talk more with Virginia Allen about her experience as a nurse at Sea View and the community the Black Angels created for themselves. That's next.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Let's get back into my interview about the new Staten Island Museum exhibit Taking Care: The Black Angels of Sea View Hospital, which explores how the Black nurses who worked at the hospital were crucial in the discovery of a treatment for tuberculosis. This is the first installment of our Black History Month series exploring the lives and contributions of Black New Yorkers. My guests are Virginia Allen, exhibit advisor and a Black Angel who worked at Sea View Hospital for 10 years, as well as curators Rylee Eterginoso and Gabriella Leone.

For this part of the conversation, we spoke more about the conditions the nurses had to live and work in and the racism they experienced. In the early 20th century, all of Sea View's overseeing staff was white, and Maria Smilios cites in her book the story of one supervisor, Mrs. Lorna Doone Mitchell, who was particularly harsh. Mitchell was the daughter of a Confederate medic, and she outwardly did not approve of many of the Black nurses.

She didn't let them wear masks, even when they were risking their lives by treating TB patients. She also banned them from transferring between hospitals. In 1937, when nurses walked into a new dining room, they found cards that said whites only. I asked Virginia whether or not she experienced any racism at Sea View as a Black nurse. She said her situation was a little bit different.

Virginia Allen: No, I didn't have it because of the place I worked, which was the children's hospital. The nurses who worked with the adult community, they suffered.

Alison Stewart: How did you support each other?

Virginia Allen: Well, a lot of the nurses were from different states, and they didn't have any family in New York. The nurses who were established, and they had homes, they offered them rooms. It was like a family. They didn't feel alone. Then, of course, the nurse's residence was there for people who wanted to stay on the grounds.

Alison Stewart: You had family, your aunt Edna?

Virginia Allen: Yes, my aunt Edna owned a home on Bradley Avenue. I lived with her for about a year and a half, and then a cousin wanted to come from Florida to go to Hunter College. I had the opportunity to move to the nurse's residence, and my cousin took my room. You know how it was in those days. The families helped each other. There was always someone from out of town in Edna's home who was either working or going to school.

Alison Stewart: Were you excited to move in with the other nurses?

Virginia Allen: I was because then I was grown up, but I was 18 at that time.

Alison Stewart: You were on your own. You had a job. You had your own money.

Virginia Allen: That's true. We thought it was a lot of money, but it really wasn't.

Alison Stewart: I want to bring our listeners back to 1951, when the drug trials that led to the breakthrough for the treatment of tuberculosis, this happened at Sea View. We've talked to Maria about her book. If you would remind our listeners, in case they didn't get to hear that part of the conversation, what was the discovery? What was the research being done that was so important?

Gabriella Leone: Hoffman Larouche laboratories were doing research on a new drug called isoniazid. They'd done animal testing, and then the first human trials of the drug were held at Sea View Hospital. Two doctors oversaw the trial there, Edward Robitzek and Irving Selikoff. Then the nursing staff at Sea View administered the trial. They would give the medicine to patients. They would track their vital signs. They would track their well-being. They would collect samples and things and then go over those results with the doctors and come together as a team and decide what the results of the trial were. Sellikoff and Robitzek published results in the Sea View quarterly.

You can read in Sea View's own bulletin the early results of these trials. Maria covers a bit of that in her book The Black Angels. Then Robitzek and Selikoff go on to win the Lasker Award, which is a prestigious award in medicine. In 1955, as happens they're the names associated with this trial, but the nurses who did the hands-on work with the patients didn't receive that same level of recognition. That's what we're excited about, presenting this story, highlighting the story for people so that they could get their due.

Alison Stewart: What do you hope people take away from this exhibition, Rylee?

Rylee Eterginoso: There's so much. There's almost like, what do we hope family members take away? What do we hope daily visitors, folks from Staten Island? I think that there's goals for every audience that we hope to welcome to the Staten Island Museum. I think first and foremost, we wanted the families to be proud. We just had our two openings, and I think that that is what Gabby and I were most concerned with. It's personal. I think that we're also dealing with a history in which people like Virginia Allen, this is her lived experience.

She is still with us. We want her to be proud. We want her to be proud of us, and we want the families to be proud and to feel recognized and to feel good. I think for Staten Islanders in general, I think one of the things that we talk about is real history happens on Staten Island constantly. I think that Staten Island is part of New York City. Staten Island tells stories that are important to Staten Island but also carry out through New York City nationally, international, and so the idea that history happened on Staten Island.

Gabriella Leone: Yes, I think in talking to families and visitors over the weekend, I think the big realization was that the work of the nurses at Sea View has impacts that are international in scope. There's still a tuberculosis crisis internationally in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Certainly researching this subject matter in the time of COVID-19 was impactful.

You could relate to things that you didn't expect to relate to about preventing infection and about infection control, public health sensibilities. This Sea View Hospital is a public hospital. There isn't a public hospital on Staten Island currently. Sea View Hospital still exists, but it's a nursing home now. Just considerations of what it's like to live in a pandemic where infectious disease is a real concern. I think people will relate to a lot of things that they read or see when they visit.

Alison Stewart: Virginia, you have offered to read a poem for us that's in the exhibition. I'd love if we could end our interview that way.

Virginia Allen: Thank you so much. I read this poem at the book launch. I'd be very happy to. A litany of remembrance. We Remember Them by Rabbi Sylvan Kamens and Rabbi Jack Riemer.

In the rising of the sun and in its going down,

we remember them.

In the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter,

we remember them.

In the opening of buds and in the rebirth of spring,

we remember them.

In the blueness of the sky and in the warmth of summer,

we remember them.

In the rustling of leaves and in the beauty of autumn,

we remember them.

In the beginning of the year and when it ends,

we remember them.

When we are weary and in need of strength,

we remember them.

When we are lost and sick at heart,

we remember them.

When we have joys we yearn to share,

we remember them.

So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us,

as we remember them.

Alison Stewart: That was Virginia Allen reading exhibit advisor and Black Angel. We've been discussing the Staten Island Museum's new exhibition taking care the Black Angels of Sea View Hospital. My guests have been Virginia Allen, Rylee Eterginoso and Gabriella Leone. Thank you so much for coming to the studio and for your work and for all you've done, Virginia.

Virginia Allen: Thank you.

Gabriella Leone: Thank you for having us.

 

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