The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis by Maria Smilios
Winner of the Christopher Award 2024NPR Science Friday Best Summer Beach Reads 2024Gotham Book Finalist 2024NASW Science in Society Journalism Award Finalist 2024PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize Finalist 2024"An incredible story...the writing is phenomenal." —John Green, author of Everything Is TuberculosisNew York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage.In the pre-antibiotic days when tuberculosis stirred people’s darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. 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 sanatorium, dubbed “the pest house,” where it was said that “no on