On Feb. 12, author Maria Smilios visited Penn to present her book featuring the stories of Black nurses who worked during the tuberculosis epidemic of the 1900s.
At the event, which took place virtually through the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, Smilios told the story of the Black nurses who stepped up to treat the tuberculosis epidemic in New York at Sea View Hospital in Staten Island, as dictated in her book “The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis.” Among the featured participants was 93-year-old Virginia Allen, a former nurse at the Sea View Hospital, who joined the event to recount her experience working with Smilios.
Smilios described how, as tuberculosis was rapidly spreading throughout New York, city officials established Sea View Hospital for treatment of the disease. She went on to describe how white nurses — concerned about the danger of the disease — either transferred or quit, and Black nurses — mostly recruited from the Jim Crow South — took the opportunity to fill those vacancies.
“It was my first job, and it felt like a dream come true,” Allen said. “And at that time, I didn’t realize I was only making pennies. Nurses back then were highly professional, but we weren’t recognized or respected as such.”
As a native New Yorker and “history lover,” Smilios said she wanted to share the stories of these women and give a voice to tuberculosis patients. Although she faced the challenge of having nearly no historical archives to search through, she obtained several oral sources, including Allen.
At the event, Allen recounted starting as a nurse at Sea View Hospital alongside her aunt. Although she did not fully understand the dangers of treating patients with a highly contagious and harmful disease, she wanted to take an “opportunity to get paid to do what [she] loved.”
“What truly matters is the care and connection we provide to our patients and their families. … It’s something no price tag can capture, despite the attempts of the healthcare corporations to commodify every aspect of care,” Allen added.
In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, event organizer and Curator of the Barbara Bates Center Jessica Martucci said that she chose Smilios as the speaker because she wanted the audience to “take away an understanding that nursing history is relevant to them, regardless or not if they’re a nurse.”
“We’ve all been impacted by nursing as a profession, as a field, whether individually, in our own care, through the care of loved ones, or just in the way that our healthcare system is structured,” Martucci added.
During the webinar, Smilios said that she wrote her book to “give voice to these people who were silenced” and to tell the story of these nurses who “because of their skin color, were also seen as unworthy and expendable … and had been erased from history for 80 years.”
“The Black Angels” is a story about many things — health inequalities, stigmas, sickness, systemic and institutional racism — but at its heart, it’s about an exceptional group of women,” she said.
Martucci echoed Smilios’ sentiment, adding that she hoped the “people can take away the idea that our history is very much still incomplete, that there are still stories out there that have not been brought to the surface.”
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