and then after a little while, being assigned to do routine work in connection with the east twenty-seventh street police station, bellevue hospital, and the new york charities department, which included branches that looked after the poor-farm, the morgue, an insane asylum or two, a workhouse and what not else, i was called upon daily to face as disagreeable and depressing a series of scenes as it is possible for a human being to witness and which quite finished me. i was compelled to inquire of fat, red-faced sergeants, and door-keepers who reigned in police stations and hospital registry rooms what was new, and, by being as genial and agreeable as possible and so earning their favor, to get an occasional tip as to the most unimportant of brawls. had i been in a different mental state the thickness and incommunicability of some of these individuals would not have been proof against my arts. i could have devised or manufactured something.
but as it was the nature of this world depressed me so that i could not have written anything very much worth while if i had wanted to. there was the morgue, for instance—that horrible place! daily from the ever-flowing waters about new york there were recaptured or washed up in all stages and degrees of decomposition the flotsam and jetsam of the great city, its offal, its victims—its what? i came here often (it stood at the foot of east twenty-sixth street near bellevue hospital) and invariably i found the same old brown-denimed caretaker in charge, a creature so thick and so lethargic and so mentally incompetent generally that it was all i could do to extract a grunt of recognition out of him. yet, if handed a cigar occasionally or a bag of tobacco, he would trouble to get out of his chair and let you look over a book or ledger containing the roughly jotted down police descriptions, all done in an amazing scrawl, of the height, weight, color of clothes if any, complexion of hair and eyes where these were still distinguishable, probable length of time in water, contents of pockets, jewelry or money if any, etc., which same were to be noted in connection with any mystery or disappearance of a person. and there was always some one “turning up missing.” and i noticed, with considerable cynicism, that rarely if ever was there any money or jewelry reported as found by the police. that would be too much to expect.
being further persuaded via blandishments or tips of one kind and another, this caretaker would lead the way to a shelf of drawers reaching from the floor to the chest-height of a man or higher and running about two sides of the room, and opening those containing the latest arrivals, supposing you were interested to look, would allow you to gaze upon the last of that strange chemical formula which once functioned as a human being here on earth. the faces! the decay! the clothing! i stared in sad horror and promised myself that i would never again look, but duty to the paper compelled me so to do again and again.
and then there was bellevue itself, that gray-black collection of brick and stone with connecting bridges of iron, which faced, in winter time at least, the gray, icy waters of the east river. i have never been able to forget it, so drear and bleak was it all. the hobbling ghouls of caretakers in their baggy brown cotton suits to be seen wandering here and there or hovering over stoves; the large number of half-well charity patients idling about in gray-green denim, their faces sunken and pinched, their hair poorly combed! and the chipper and yet often coarse and vulgar and always overbearing young doctors and nurses and paid attendants generally! one need but remember that it was the heyday of the most corrupt period of tammany hall’s shameless political control of new york, mr. croker being still in charge. quite all of those old buildings have since been replaced and surrounded by a tall iron fence and bordered with an attractive lawn. in those days it was a little different: there was the hospital proper, with its various wards, its detention hospital for the criminal or insane, or both, the morgue and a world of smaller pavilions stretching along the riverfront and connected by walks or covered hallways or iron bridges, but lacking the dignity and care of the later structures. there was, too, the dark psychology which attends any badly or foully managed institution, that something which hovers as a cloud over all. and bellevue at that time had that air and that psychology. it smacked more of a jail and a poor-house combined than of a hospital, and so it was, i think. at that time it was a seething world of medical and political and social graft, a kind of human hell or sty. those poor fish who live in comfortable and protected homes and find their little theories and religious beliefs ready-made for them in some overawing church or social atmosphere, should be permitted to take an occasional peep into a world such as this was then. at this very time there was an investigation and an exposure on in connection with this institution, which had revealed not only the murder of helpless patients but the usual graft in connection with food, drugs, clothing, etc., furnished to the patients called charity. grafting officials and medics and brutes of nurses and attendants abounded, of course. the number of “drunks” and obstreperous or complaining or troublesome patients doped or beaten or thrown out and even killed, and the number and quality of operations conducted by incompetent or indifferent surgeons, was known and shown to be large. one need only return to the legislative investigations of that date to come upon the truth of this.
but the place was so huge and crowded that it was like a city in itself. for one thing, it was a dumping-ground for all the offal gathered by the police and the charity departments, to say nothing of being a realm of “soft snaps” for political pensioners of all kinds. on such days as relatives and friends of charity patients or those detained by the police were permitted to call, the permit room fairly swarmed with people who were pushed and shunted here and there like cattle, and always browbeaten like slaves. i myself, visiting as a stranger subsequently, was often so treated. “who? what’s his name? what? whendee come? when? talk a little louder, can’t you? whatsy matter with your tongue? over there! over there! out that door there!” so we came, procured our little cards, and passed in or out.
and the wretched creatures who were “cured” or written down well enough to walk, and so, before a serious illness had been properly treated and because they were not able to pay, were shunted out into the world of the well and the strong with whom they were supposed to compete once more and make their way. i used to see them coming and going and have talked to scores, men and women who had never had a dollar above their meager needs and who, once illness overtook them, had been swept into this limbo, only to be turned out again at the end of a few weeks or months to make their way as best they might, and really worse off than when they came, for now they were in a weak condition physically as well as penniless, and sometimes, as i noticed, on the day of their going the weather was most inclement. and the old, wrinkled, washed-out clothing doled out to them in which they were to once more wander back to the tenements—to do what? there was a local charity organization at the time, as there is today, but if it acted in behalf of any of these i never saw it. they wandered away west on twenty-sixth street and along first and second avenue, those drear, dismal, underdog streets—to where?
but by far the most irritating of all the phases of this institution, to me at least, were the various officials and dancing young medics and nurses in their white uniforms, the latter too often engaged in flirting with one another or tennis-playing or reading in some warm room, their feet planted upon a desk the while they smoked and the while the great institution with all its company of miserables wagged its indifferent way. when not actually visiting their patients one could always find them so ensconced somewhere, reading or smoking or talking or flirting. in spite of the world of misery that was thrashing about them they were as comfortable as may be, and to me, when bent upon unraveling the details of some particular case, they always seemed heartless. “oh, that old nut? what’s interesting about him? surely you don’t expect to dig up anything interesting about him, do you? he’s been here three weeks now. no; we don’t know anything about him. don’t the records show?” or, supposing he had died: “i knew he couldn’t live. we couldn’t give him the necessary attention here. he didn’t have any money, and there’s too many here as it is. wanta see an interesting case?” and then one might be led in to some wretch who was out of his mind or had an illusion of some kind. “funny old duck, eh? but there’s no hope. he’ll be dead in a week or so.”
i think the most sickening thing i ever saw was cash gambling among two young medics and a young nurse in charge of the receiving ward as to whether the next patient to be brought in by the ambulance, which had been sent out on a hurry accident call, would arrive alive or dead.
“fifty that he’s dead!”
“fifty that he isn’t!”
“i say alive!”
“i say dead!”
“well, hand me that stethoscope. i’m not going to be fooled by looks this time!”
tearing in came the ambulance, its bell clanging, the hubs of the wheels barely missing the walls of the entryway, and as the stretcher was pulled out and set down on the stone step under the archway the three pushed about and hung over, feeling the heart and looking at the eyes and lips, now pale blue as in death, quite as one might crowd about a curious specimen of plant or animal.
“he’s alive!”
“he’s dead!”
“i say he’s alive! look at his eyes!” to illustrate which one eye was forced open.
“aw, what’s eatin’ you! listen to his heart! haven’t i got the stetho on it? listen for yourself!”
the man was dead, but the jangle lasted a laughing minute or more, the while he lay there; then he was removed to the morgue and the loser compelled to “come across” or “fork over.”
one of the internes who occasionally went out “on the wagon,” as the ambulance was called, told me that once, having picked up a badly injured man who had been knocked down by a car, this same ambulance on racing with this man to the hospital had knocked down another and all but killed him.
“and what did you do about him?” i asked.
“stopped the boat and chucked him into it, of course.”
“on top of the other one?”
“side by side, sure. it was a little close, though.”
“well, did he die?”
“yep. but the other one was all right. we couldn’t help it, though. it was a life or death case for the first one.”
“a fine deal for the merry bystander,” was all i could say.
the very worst of all in connection with this great hospital, and i do not care to dwell on it at too great length since it has all been exposed before and the records are available, was this: about the hospital, in the capacity of orderlies, doormen, gatemen, errand boys, gardeners, and what not, were a number of down-and-out ex-patients or pensioners of politicians so old and feeble and generally decrepit mentally and physically as to be fit for little more than the scrap-heap. their main desire, in so far as i could see, was to sit in the sun or safely within the warmth of a room and do nothing at all. if you asked them a question their first impulse and greatest delight was to say “don’t know” or refer you to some one else. they were accused by the half dozen reporters who daily foregathered here to be of the lowest, so low indeed that they could be persuaded to do anything for a little money. and in pursuance of this theory there was one day propounded by a little red-headed irish police reporter who used to hang about there that he would bet anybody five dollars that for the sum of fifteen dollars he could hire old gansmuder, who was one of the shabbiest and vilest-looking of the hospital orderlies, to kill a man. according to him, and he had his information from one of the policemen stationed in the hospital, gansmuder was an ex-convict who had done ten years’ time for a similar crime. now old and penniless, he was here finishing up a shameful existence, the pensioner of some politician to whom he had rendered a service perhaps.
at any rate here he was, and, as one of several who heard the boast in the news-room near the gate, i joined in the shout of derision that went up. “rot!” “what stuff!” “well, you’re the limit, mickey!” however, as events proved, it was not so much talk as fact. i was not present at the negotiations but from amazed accounts by other newspaper men i learned that gansmuder, being approached by finn and one other (finn first, then the two of them together), agreed for the sum of twenty-five dollars, a part of it to be paid in advance, to lie in wait at a certain street corner in brooklyn for an individual of a given description and there to strike him in such a way as to dispose of him. of course the negotiations went no further than this, but somehow, true or no, this one incident has always typified the spirit of that hospital, and indeed of all political new york, to me. it was a period of orgy and crime, and bellevue and the charities department constituted the back door which gave onto the river, the asylums, the potter’s field, and all else this side of complete chemic dissolution.