Quick! What’s the first thing you think of when you hear “Bellevue Hospital?”
Well, okay, if you didn’t say “literature,” “poetry,” or “creative writing,” you wouldn’t be the only one.
Bellevue is the oldest public hospital in the United States, founded in 1736 as a 6-bed infirmary on the second floor of a “Publick Workhouse and House of Correction.” Over the last 275 years, Bellevue has grown into one of the largest and most famous public hospitals, not only serving generations of New Yorkers and the waves of immigrants to America’s shores, but also training cadres of doctors and nurses. It has weathered the dips and peaks of yellow fever, tuberculosis, typhoid, influenza, and HIV, as well as the common ailments of the day.
Like New York City itself, Bellevue has been a nexus for creative people. Walker Percy was an intern at Bellevue until he contracted tuberculosis during an autopsy. Eugene O’Neil, Malcolm Lowry, and Norman Mailer each spent time at Bellevue. For the Beat poets, a stint at Bellevue was nearly de riguer. William S Burroughs, after discovering the infidelity of his lover Jack Anderson, cut off one of his fingers, and soon made the trip to Bellevue Hospital. Burrough’s wife, Joan Vollmer, ended up in Bellevue addicted to speed, before Burroughs accidentally shot her dead in a drunken William Tell act at age 30. Delmore Schwartz, the poet and literary critic, was both a psychiatric patient and a corpse at Bellevue Hospital. In the world of jazz, Bellevue has been visited by no less than Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Charlie Christian, and Dizzy Gillespie.
But since 2001, there has been a creative flowering of another sort. The Bellevue Literary Review—the first literary journal to come from a medical center—was founded. A “journal of humanity and human experience,” the BLR publishes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that touch upon relationships to the human body, illness, health and healing.
Over its 10-year life-span, the BLR has grown in size and stature. Fielding 4000 submissions a year, running an annual literary prize plus two annual free public readings, the BLR has become a nexus for creative thought in the realm of the human body and mind. (And in 2005, the Bellevue Literary Press was founded. It only took five years for the Pulitzer Prize to come its way.)
The BLR is please to be a community partner with the Places & Pages Literary Festival. Please look for copies of the journal at the co-op, and grab your buy-one-get-one-free subscription forms.
Danielle Ofri
Editor-in-Chief
The Bellevue Literary Review is a Pages & Places Community Partner, and the Bellevue Literary Press is participating in Pages& Places Book Expo.
Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, DLitt (Hon), FACP is an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital, Associate Professor of Medicine at New York University School of Medicine, and author of three books about her experience at Bellevue Hospital and the multicultural aspects of medicine. Dr. Ofri’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Los Angeles Times, and on National Public Radio. Her writings have been included in Best American Essays 2002 and 2005, and Best American Science Writing 2003. She is the recipient of the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize for nonfiction and the McGovern award by the American Medical Writers Association for “preeminent contributions to medical communication.” She has received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Curry College and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. You read more about her at http://danielleofri.com/.
1 Comment
Of Danielle’s many accomplishments and awards, perhaps the one that strikes me as most apt is that from the AMWA for “preeminent contributions to medical communication.” Her essays are touching, beautiful, and true. The partnership between BLR and the Pages & Places Festival is certainly apt. Wonderful to think of this combination of literary forces at work!
Raining Acorns
September 4, 2010 at 3:32 pm