THE NEW BELLEVUE HOSPITAL 
NEW YORK CITY 
Designed by McKim. Mead & White. Architects 
B ELLEVUE Hospital is, with its con¬ 
nected hospitals—Fordham, Harlem, 
and Gouverneur—the city hospital of New 
York. It receives temporarily, in addition 
to the usual general hospital cases, the in¬ 
sane, criminal and alcoholic, and, besides the 
patients who naturally come to it, it must 
take those whom the privately endowed hos¬ 
pitals cannot or do not wish to care for, and 
whom they send to Bellevue to the number 
of fifteen hundred and upwards quarterly. 
Each, of course, had less than half the 
proper area ; and the overcrowding in this 
instance was in a ward where the patients 
must be carefully watched to prevent them 
from doing violence to themselves or others. 
In the Boston City Hospital, and in the 
privately endowed hospitals of New York, 
there are four or five patients per nurse. In 
Bellevue, there are from nine and ten up¬ 
wards, sometimes as many as eighteen, per 
nurse. It is impossible for a nurse to give 
A PERSPECTIVE VIEW SHOWING THE ENTRANCE TO THE HOSPITAL FROM FIRST AVENUE 
The existing buildings have a nominal capac¬ 
ity of nine hundred. One hundred and 
twenty-five are discharged daily. One-half 
of these are not in fit condition to leave the 
hospital, but they must do so to make room 
for more pressing cases. There is no room 
for convalescents : there is not enough room 
for the seriously ill. In one prison ward, 
designed for ten, there were at one time 
during the past winter twenty-two patients— 
twelve on mattresses between the beds. 
proper attention to so many, even when they 
are ordinary cases, to say nothing of when 
they are insane or alcoholic. Under such 
circumstances, and with improper housing, 
the medical staff' has had several instances 
of prostration among its members. 
These conditions are not the result of bad 
management. They are, on the contrary, 
partly the result of as good management as 
is possible with the inadequate accommoda¬ 
tions, for the treatment of the sick has been 
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