The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars | 420 ratings

Price: 19.69

Last update: 09-12-2024


About this item

New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nurse shortage. So begins the remarkable true story of the Black nurses who helped cure one of the world’s deadliest plagues: tuberculosis.

During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed one in seven people, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed facility, dubbed “the pest house” where “no one left alive.”

Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this story follows the intrepid young women, the “Black Angels,” who, for twenty years, risked their lives working under dreadful conditions while caring for the city’s poorest—1,800 souls languishing in wards, waiting to die or become “guinea pigs” for experimental (often deadly) drugs. Yet despite their major role in desegregating the NYC hospital system—and regardless of their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculosis at Sea View—these nurses were completely erased from history. The Black Angels recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this riveting story celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival.

Cover photo of nurses courtesy of NYCHHC/SeaView Archives


Top reviews from the United States

Coco Boom
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing read!
Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2024
This book was full of so many emotions. I was angry for the nurses and devastated about the things the TB patients had to survive. I appreciated the history and timelines of the story. These brave women really were angels on earth. I highly recommend reading, I did have to look up some of the medical words, but for the most part it was easy to grasp. It is amazing how little of this history is available. Thank you for honoring these nurses and telling this beautiful story of science and human compassion.
tess arevalo
5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling true story that everyone should read!!!
Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2023
This is a wonderful, exhaustively researched book, about a group of Black nurses who came to work at Sea View TB hospital on Staten Island in the late 1920s, to take care of New York City’s poorest residents when white nurses began quitting for a variety of reasons.

The story is beautifully told and begins with Edna Sutton, a young woman from Savannah whose dreams of becoming a nurse but is stuck in the Jim Crow south where Black nurses couldn’t work in white hospitals. Then she gets an offer to come north to Sea View and it’s from this moment onward where the story explodes into a harrowing medical tale.

Once on Staten Island, Smilios takes you deep inside the wards of Sea View and introduces you to the patients, the poor men, women, and children who have been sent away to this “pest house” by the city to die and who become test subjects for operations that “turn to butchery.”

Smilios does an exceptional job of weaving together the stories of the patients, tuberculosis in the early-mid 1900s, the role of the Sea View as a “great clearinghouse for TB patients” and its later role in the first human trials of Isoniazid. This is not only a human story of the Black Angels, as their patients called them, but also of Sea View’s patients, many of whom went there to die.

This book touched me deeply and for days I thought about those patients who died and the courageous nurses who endured such terrible racism but still continued working with this deadly disease. I hope this becomes required reading and like Hidden Figures the Black Angels become known around the world.

Go read this book now!
Kristin Lamendola
4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable and informative book
Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2024
I enjoyed this book and learned so much about this dreaded disease. Glad that the Black Angels were finally given the credit for all that they did.
Lupe Reynoso
5.0 out of 5 stars The Black Angels
Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2024
I have just now finished reading Maria Smilios book THE BLACK ANGELS.
What an Amazing Book! As a retired Public Health Nurse who treated many Active and Inactive TB patients throughout my years as Nurse Manager in a rural Public Health Clinic, I was intrigued by the subtitle, The Untold Story of the Nurses who Helped Cure Tuberculosis. The author wrote this captivating story with detailed and compassionate historic description.
I was enthralled with excitement and sincere heart pain for racial inequalities and determination of spirits. I heartily encourage all nurses and student nurses to read this emotionally stimulating, educational and Epic book.
Thank you Maria Smilios!
AR Kraus
5.0 out of 5 stars History I'd never heard
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2024
The real tragedy of history classes in public school is they never really teach you about Black History. I'm so glad Maria came to talk to us at Humana cause now I know the story of these Angels on Earth that cared for the least of us. Thank you, Maria, and thank you, Black Angels, for being amazing and the very best of us.
Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible Story
Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2024
It's such a great read.
It was wonderful to see the progression of treatments. Just as with Covid, science changes and improvements are constantly being made. Everyone must trust the process.

As a nurse, I will never join the ANA unless they apologize for the racist policies.
Kat
5.0 out of 5 stars The changing climate of medicine, racism, and politics.
Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2024
I was expecting a book about nurses, and this is so much more. Read this amazing story and be transported to a very volatile time complete with 2 world wars. The strength of these women is unfathomable, and yet the medical piece is so reminiscent of what my fellow nurses and I went through with the Covid19 outbreak. There is so much more to this story and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles. While reading, I quickly learned how ignorant I was to life during this time. You will not regret this read. May the accomplishments of these ladies live on.
Melissa H-H
4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written group biography of Black nurses in a TB sanatarium before antibiotics
Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2024
I'm a geek for medical histories, and this one is special. These nurses, truly the titular Black Angels, cared for thousands of tuberculosis patients in a public New York City sanatarium. Besides illuminating the thankless work of nurses in a communicable disease hospital prior to antibiotics, this book focuses on the demands put upon the most oppressed in American society that keep said society humming along. These well-educated Black medical professionals were hired only after the preferred white nurses refused to help in such a dangerous environment. Deeply researched and absolutely beautifully written- I've already suggested to several people.

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