How An Unlikely Cohort of Black Nurses at a New York Sanatorium Helped Cure Tuberculosis

History Unplugged Podcast · Sep 12, 2023 · 54m

Nearly a century before the COVID-19 pandemic upended life as we know it, a devastating tuberculosis epidemic was ravaging hospitals across the country. In those dark, pre-antibiotic days, the disease claimed the lives of 1 in 7 Americans; in the United States alone, it killed over 5.6 million people in the first half of the twentieth century. Nowhere was TB more rampant than in New York City, where it spread like wildfire through the tenements, decimating the city’s poorest residents. The city’s hospital system was already overwhelmed when, in 1929, the white nurses at Staten Island’s Sea…