“The biggest challenge I overcame is the ability to tell my story,” said 92-year-old Virginia Allen, the last surviving Black Angel from Sea View Hospital. She worked in the tuberculosis (TB) sanitarium at Sea View during New York’s tuberculosis outbreak, where a lung specialist developed isoniazid, the long sought-after treatment for tuberculosis.
Allen is an example of the living history featured in Maria Smilios’s bestselling novel, available on Amazon, “The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis.” Smilios uncovers the story of this group of Black nurses and how they overcame the deadly TB breakout in a pre-antibiotic era. At that time, the isolated Sea View Hospital on Staten Island was one of the city’s few municipal hospitals that didn’t discriminate against Black nurses, along with Harlem, Lincoln, and Metropolitan Hospitals.
The TB sanitarium was understaffed after the majority of on-staff nurses quit to protect themselves from contracting the disease. TB was the leading cause of death in the nation in the 1940s. New York City started the Registration Law, a decree ordering doctors and nurses to report names and addresses of every person sick with TB to the Metropolitan Board of Health. After data was collected, Sea View’s TB sanitarium was created to hold more than 2,000 TB patients, and was condemned as “the pest house.”
There was a nursing shortage borough-wide in New York, caused by WWI. To win the war against TB, the city started recruiting Black nurses nationwide with the “rare opportunity” of on-the-job training and housing. One of these Black nurses was then 16-year-old Virginia Allen, who worked and lived in the nurses’ residence dormitory at Sea View from 1947 to 1957.
Allen and Smilios joined moderator Professor Heather Butts, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a contributor to the AmNews, in a discussion that explored the challenges highlighted in the book and what is being done to preserve this crucial part of African American history.
“This book was a way to preserve this almost-erased part of history,” said Smilios during her Q&A with current Columbia nursing students. Smilios explained how she is using her work to highlight an important part of history and celebrate the legacy of the Black Angels. The book details their bravery and spirit in treating TB patients.
In 2015, Smilios was working as a freelance developmental editor for Springer Science+ Business Media and editing a book on rare lung diseases. She came across a line about Sea View and the creation of the cure for tuberculosis. The line led to the work of Edward Robitzek, the doctor who spearheaded the first TB drug trials with isoniazid.
Smilios reached out to Allen, and they met in a cafe in Harlem Hospital, where she listened to Allen’s powerful testimony. Allen told Smilios there was no recorded history of the Sea View since it closed its doors in 1961.
“I was next invited into Ms. Allen’s home in Staten Island,” said Smilios. Allen lives in one of the former nurses’ residences, now a private retirement home called Park Lane at Sea View. Her fourth-floor apartment is on the very same floor where she resided in the 1940s.
“Ms. Allen invited me over to her home numerous times, and I recorded hours of conversation for research for this book,” said Smilios. “I also contacted the son of Dr. Robtizek, John Robitzek. He would spend hours talking about his father—who he was as a person, and what he did for medicine.”
In the Q&A part of the discussion, Butts asked what came next in the story of the Black Angels. This led to the exciting announcement of an exhibition that is currently in progress at the Staten Island Museum (Snug Harbor).
The Black Angels are the basis for the exhibition, “Taking Care,” which will open for public viewing starting on Saturday, Jan. 27, 2024, with a reception. The exhibition will display the legacy of the Black nurses at Sea View Hospital; Smilios is on the scholar advisory panel. The exhibition will feature films and art installations by artists Elissa Blount-Moorhead and Bradford Young, connecting the contributions the Black Angels made to Black healthcare.
Before ending the lecture with questions from the audience, Allen was asked if there was going to be a follow up book that she wrote. “I am 92, and lived a marvelous life!” Allen replied. “After retiring from nursing in 1995, I moved on to working for the unions fighting for nurse’s rights, and many other jobs. I feel I could write a book in my own words, we’ll see…”
For more information about the exhibition and the opening reception, send an email to info@statenislandmuseum.org.