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A stone sign that reads "Gateways Hospital and Community Mental Health Center."

How Louis Ziskind Helped Deinstitutionalize Mental Healthcare

A community health center in Los Angeles that sought to get patients back into the community.
Photo of surgeons performing surgery in a dimly lit operation room.
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For Hospitals, ‘Nonprofit’ Doesn't Mean ‘Charitable’

Medical debt has always been part of the history of nonprofit hospitals.

The Hospital Occupation That Changed Public Health Care

The Young Lords took over Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx on July 14, 1970. Their demand? Accessible, quality health care for all.
Medical professionals confer at the entrance to a hospital emergency room.
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Doctors and Hospitals Are Struggling Financially in a Pandemic. Here’s Why.

Procedures drive the bottom line in our medical system.

The Ruin: Roosevelt Island’s Smallpox Hospital

An inside look at a forgotten Northeast epicenter of smallpox treatment.
Reconstruction of Mt. Malady hospital at Henricus Historical Park, Virginia.
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Health Care in the New World

Reporter Catherine Moore visits the first hospital in the New World and finds out why the “public plan” in the Virginia colony may have had its drawbacks.
Marine hospital

Sailors’ Health and National Wealth

That the federal government created this health care system for merchant mariners in the early American republic will surprise many.
Lee Pattie Registrar's Report

Trouble with the Brothers: Booze, Divorce, and Madness in the American West

The past really is a foreign country, as historian Jonathan Ablard finds when piecing together the turbulent history of his ancestors in the West and Midwest.
Walt Whitman

Brag and Humblebrag: Walt Whitman’s Encounters

Walt Whitman was a champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag.
The Young Lords in New York, 1969-1976.

How New York City’s Radical Social Movements Gave Rise to Hip-Hop

The revolutionary history behind one of America’s main musical exports.
A painting of a Staten Island harbor filled with boats, captioned "View of the Marine Hospital and Quarantine Grounds, Staten Island, New York."

Quarantine Scenes in Staten Island History

Staten Island's long battle against quarantine restrictions, from yellow fever to COVID-19.
Woman in a hospital bed reading a pamphlet called "After the Abortion."

Her “Health and Thus Her Life”

Abortion exceptions in legal history.
A row of beds at the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm.
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“I Don’t Expect Many Escapes”

On the rise of the narcotic farm model, a radical reimagining of the nation’s approach to addiction.
Black nurses and Sea View Hospital.

The ‘Black Angels’ Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

Professional nurses who moved north during the Great Migration worked in New York City’s most contagious sanatorium — and changed the course of public health.
A copy of "On Death and Dying" with a magnifying glass in front of it.

Lost in the Five Stages of Grief

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “On Death and Dying” sparked a revolution in end-of-life care. But soon she began to deny mortality altogether.
Grave marker for "Special Case - Baby 1."

The Search for Special Case–Baby 1

Who was buried in the lonely grave in New York’s potter’s field? The year-long search led to a lost world in the history of AIDS.
A photograph of the Arizona desert at sunset with cacti in the foreground.

I Want Settlers To Be Dislodged From the Comfort of Guilt

My ancestors were the good whites, or at least that’s what I’ve always wanted to believe.
Nurses attend to patients in rows of hospital beds.

In 19th-Century Philadelphia, Female Medical Students Lobbied Hard for Mutual Aid

In a century-long tradition, students at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania came together in solidarity to combat illness among their members.
Syringes on the beach.

Hypodermics on the Shore

The “syringe tides”—waves of used hypodermic needles, washing up on land—terrified beachgoers of the late 1980s. Their disturbing lesson was ignored.
Tom Scully, stethescopes, and money.

Patient Zero

Tom Scully is as responsible as anyone for the way health care in America works today.
Art depicting Jimmy Hoffa pulling the lever of a slot machine.

What Happened in Vegas

The Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa—with a little help from the mob—built Las Vegas as we know it today.
Randolph L. White, UVA Hospital, Black hospital workers, union newsletter.

UVA and the History of Race: Confronting Labor Discrimination

The UVA president’s commissions on Slavery and on the University in the Age of Segregation were established to find and tell the stories of a painful past.
Lutiant LaVoye

Searching for Lutiant: An American Indian Nurse Navigates a Pandemic

A 1918 letter sent a historian diving into the archives to learn more about its author.
A toddler at a small table eat a plate of food with a large glass of milk.

Empathy in the Archive: Care and Disdain for Wet Nursing Mothers

The complex story of wet nurses and their children in the time before the advent of baby formula.
John F. Kennedy signing a kickball for a boy on crutches.

Who Was the Original ’Poster Child‘?

How the March of Dimes used children to raise money for polio research.
Paul Thompson photograph of Staten Island Shipbuilding Company interior view, early 1900s, PK 4119, Staten Island Museum Photo Collection, Staten Island Museum, Staten Island, New York.

Crisis, Disease, Shortage, And Strike: Shipbuilding On Staten Island In World War I

How an industry responded to the needs of workers and of the federal government during a time of rapid mobilization for wartime production.
A picture of George Aumoithe in a hallway of concrete walls.

Learning From Decades of Public Health Failure

A historian of global health explains how the lack of ICU beds in low-income communities is the result of government spending cuts dating back to the 1970s.
Collage of a man's photograph within a cutout of another man

Searching for Mr. X

For eight years, a man without a memory lived among strangers at a hospital in Mississippi. But was recovering his identity the happy ending he was looking for?

Seeing the Pandemic Through the Shuttered Bungalows of an L.A. Sanatorium

Once a haven for tuberculosis patients, Barlow Respiratory Hospital is uniquely suited to the COVID and post-COVID eras.
A COVID-19 burial in India

This Pandemic Isn’t Over

The smallpox epidemic of the 1860s offers us a valuable, if disconcerting, clue about how epidemics actually end.

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