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How black nurses beat TB
MARJORIE MAYO recommends a remarkable book that restores another of history’s racially biased omissions
COMPASSION: Nurses at Oak Ridge Hospital in the 1940s
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The Black Angels: The untold story of the nurses who helped cure tuberculosis
Maria Smilios, Virago, £12.99
THE BLACK ANGELS provides “an invaluable restoration of another of history’s racially biased omissions”, as the book’s front cover explains.
Black nurses faced the challenges of working with tuberculosis (TB) patients before there were effective cures, challenges that were compounded by their experiences of racial discrimination in the community as well as in the workplace. This is the remarkable story of their courage and determination, in the face of these challenges.
Caring for TB patients was highly dangerous at the time that the book opens, in 1929, when TB was a highly infectious and effectively incurable disease. As a result, white nurses were leaving Sea View, the Staten Island hospital (off New York City) where so many TB patients were being treated. So, black nurses from the Southern states of the US were being recruited in their place.
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