Many historians, including myself, have told the story of New York City’s Sea View Hospital, a tuberculosis sanatorium that operated from 1913 to 1961. But only now, with the publication of Maria Smilios’s new book, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis, is a crucial part of Sea View’s… Read more →
Tag: black women
A Duet With History: Lizzo and James Madison’s Crystal Flute
At her Washington DC concert on September 27, 2022, musician and pop superstar Lizzo played a 200-year-old crystal flute that once belonged to James Madison onstage in front of an audience of thousands. While living in the White House, Madison continued to own and operate his Montpelier plantation in Virginia, where he enslaved over 300… Read more →
“If they were white and insured, would they have died?”: Contextualizing the 2022 Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Report
In December 2022 – a few days shy of the new year – the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee (MMMRC) and Department of State Health Services released a joint Biennial Report on maternal mortality and morbidity rates in the state. They use term “maternal mortality” to describe the death of a childbearing person… Read more →
The Season of NICU
We spent all of winter in the NICU. When I was 25 weeks pregnant, I went into preterm labor and gave birth to my daughter. She weighed just one pound 13 ounces and was barely one foot long. Having a micropreemie in the NICU feels like an alternate reality. Time stops working the way one… Read more →
An Untold Story: Black Maternal Mortality in the United States
In April 2016, Kira Johnson, 39, and her husband were excited to bring their second child into the world. After delivering via C-section, her husband noticed something wrong. He alerted the medical staff that there was blood in Kira’s catheter. While the staff promised to immediately do blood work and order a CT scan, it… Read more →
Our Work is Not Complete Yet: The Tuberculosis Nurse Training Program at Virginia’s Piedmont Sanatorium
In May 1940, the Piedmont Sanatorium in Burkeville, Virginia, graduated eight African American nurses with advanced training in tuberculosis care. A “Class History” and “Class Prophecy” presented at the commencement ceremony articulated the value of educational attainment, individual determination, and collegial support. As discussed in the Nursing Clio series, Beyond Florence, the history of nursing… Read more →
Vanguard: The Fights that Connect Black Women Activists across More Than Two Centuries
My undergraduate and MA adviser, Dr. Angela Howard, argued that women across time and space often have remarkably similar experiences if you zero in on major events in their lives. These include first marriages, first babies, menopause, or widowhood. She encouraged me to compare women at these moments of their lives even if they occurred… Read more →
Informed Transitions
Transitions can be hard, especially when one has spent decades teetering on shifting sand. With my menopause comes an emptying nest and a great and painful purge of my reproductive potential, accumulated clutter, dreams, and fears. I am 55 this year, African American, a tenured college professor, a widow, and single mother of two sons. I have… Read more →
Black Before Florence: Black Nurses, Enslaved Labor, and the British Royal Navy, 1790–1820
Throughout the eighteenth century, the British Royal Navy embarked on a scheme of hospital construction in the Atlantic World. The largest hospitals were in the British Isles, but those that dealt with the highest mortality were in the Greater Caribbean. Most naval medical history focuses on male medical officers, while most nursing history examines the… Read more →
Marie Branch and the Power of Nursing
In June 2020, when millions took to the streets in the midst of a pandemic to protest police attacks on Black lives, public statements began to trickle out of major nursing organizations. The American Nurses Association (ANA) called racism “a public health crisis,” while the American Association of Colleges of Nursing declared that “racism will… Read more →