Couldn’t attend the Davis Lecture? A recording of author Maria Smilios’ presentation is available online.
Maria’s presentation “Sickness & Stigma at Sea View: The Black Angels” covered the deadly disease of tuberculosis and the untold story of the nurses (the Black Angels) who cared for those patients.
“The Black Angels” is the true story of the Black nurses who, in 1929, wagered their lives by leaving the Jim Crow south and went north to work on an isolated hilltop in Staten Island at Sea View Hospital. The “pest house” was an overcrowded municipal tuberculosis sanatorium where the city sent its poorest residents, considered “uncouth and un-American consumptives” to languish and die.