Damnation Island by Stacy Horn

Author:Stacy Horn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2018-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

IV

The Hospitals for the Poor

In operation beginning 1832, to serve the sick people of New York City, and the inmates of the Penitentiary, Workhouse, and Almshouse

Penitentiary Hospital aka Island Hospital aka Charity Hospital aka City Hospital

It started out as the Penitentiary Hospital, but it wasn’t an actual hospital. It was a room on the top floor of the Penitentiary, and it eventually took over the whole floor. Hundreds of men, most of them suffering from various stages of syphilis, from initial genital ulcers to large and putrid abscesses all over their bodies, were packed into one barred room, without access to a bathroom. Years later it hadn’t improved. “I defy the stoutest-­hearted layman to go through the wards of this hospital,” a New York Times reporter wrote, “without fairly growing sick at the stomach.”

The women had it better. They were housed in two pavilions at the southern tip of the Island. According to the commissioner overseeing the institution, the location had the “advantage of good air, affording a very necessary element in the cure of the almost special disease here treated.” Syphilis had no truly effective treatment at the time, but that didn’t stop the commissioner from proudly proclaiming in 1847 that “the Penitentiary Hospital is the Venereal Hospital of the City” (italics, in both cases, his). It was also, for the poor, the only venereal hospital in the city, and in order to be treated there you had to go to prison first.

Like the Almshouse, the process began at the office of the Superintendent of Outdoor Poor. If sick people couldn’t afford a private hospital they would fill out an application to receive medical care at the city hospital, which in the early history of New York meant Bellevue. While they were examined by a physician, someone else was making sure the applicant was truly destitute, with no friends or family who could pay their bills. If everything checked out, they were admitted, but if they had syphilis or another venereal disease, they were turned away and sent instead to police court. The only way for them to get treatment, such as it was before the discovery of antibiotics, was to voluntarily commit themselves to the Penitentiary for vagrancy, where they would eventually be transferred to the top floor.

The new prisoners/patients had to wear prison stripes, and were treated like any other convict at the Penitentiary. Even though they’d committed themselves, the length of their sentence, usually one to six months, was assigned at the whim of the police justice.

Dr. William W. Sanger, who was put in charge of the hospital in 1846, objected. Not everyone who gets syphilis is a criminal, he argued. “A poor woman, without crime or fault on her own part,” could contract syphilis from a drunken, philandering husband. A laborer who’d never committed a crime in his life might get drunk one night and catch the disease from a prostitute. “When he comes out of the Hospital, where he has been associated ‘with thieves,

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