Bellevue Diary
Lights within the Shadows
by
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Bellevue Hospital In 1736, when Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States, was founded, George Washington may have been four or five years old. Following a fire that occurred sometime around the turn of the century, between 1906 and 1939 Bellevue was rebuilt in bits and pieces. She now shows her age: a conglomerate of brick buildings stretching along First Avenue from Twenty-Fifth Street to Thirtieth Street. The one architectural element that gives her an illusion of grandeur is the Administrative Building, which faces First Avenue. Its strong, vertical, inlaid concrete columns take one’s gaze upward to a pseudo-Athenian temple facade that towers two stories above the adjacent roofs. What makes Bellevue great is that she is the hospital from which “no one is turned away.” She is an open-ended funnel into which New York dumps its poor, elderly, and dying. If an individual presents at another hospital for admission and it is apparent that he or she will demand a disproportionate amount of care, the admitting physician has only to write “No beds” and the patient is Bellevue-bound.
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About the Book
From its founding 1736, Bellevue Hospital has been a dumping ground into which a city poured its poor, elderly, and dying. What makes the oldest hospital in the United States unique is that Bellevue is a place from which no one in need is turned away.
Bellevue Diary is a collection of short stories borne out of Dr. Monif ’s year of internship that collectively pays tribute to this great hospital.
“Bellevue Diary is mosaic of short snippets of stories. Mosaics have to be near perfect to work. Ironically, this one comes close. What is surprising that it works on multiple levels: a historical characterization of a place and time and the impact of the Bellevue Hospital on a young physician’s professional and spiritual growth into which is woven a thesis of death’s ultimate meaning. The pieces all come together to make this mosaic good reading.”
—Peter Firchow, PhDFormer Professor of English – University of Minnesota
About the Author
Gilles Monif, M.D. goes from Bellevue Hospital to the National Institutes of Health as a research fellow, and then to the University of Florida College of Medicine, and finally to Creighton University School of Medicine, He will achieve international recognition as a clinician, researcher, and educator in the area of infectious diseases that afflict women and their unborn babies. Currently, he resides in the Midwest with his wife and four children where he is president of a medical research company. In his life, A-3 cast a long shadow