For 25 years, Bellevue Literary Review has been publishing stories, essays, and poems that take readers into the shared space where art and medicine meet. Throughout our anniversary year, we’re marking this incredible milestone by inviting you on a journey through the BLR archive, from the beginning through the present.
Join us each week as we curate special highlights — stories, poems, photos, and more — from each of our issues.
About the Issue
The fourth issue of Bellevue Literary Review featured writings about tuberculosis, as well as photos from the archives of the Chest Service at Bellevue Hospital. Additionally, Issue 4 published a very early work of fiction by Abraham Verghese, who later went on to write the best-selling novels Cutting for Stone and The Covenant of Water.
From the Foreword
“Tuberculosis has woven its way through the arts as the prototype of the romantic illness. In such classics as The Magic Mountain and La Bohème, TB serves as a medium for spirituality, love, and self-reflection. At Bellevue Hospital, TB is far less romantic, more routinely associated with bloody coughs, raging fevers, and wasting away, than it is with artistic delicacy. The Bellevue Chest Service opened in 1903 to deal with the tuberculosis epidemic of the time, introducing many significant new medical treatments. The epidemic waned, but the Chest Service never closed, and indeed was ready with open doors when tuberculosis re-emerged with a vengeance in the 1980s on the coattails of HIV, homelessness, and drug addiction.
This year marks the centennial of the Bellevue Chest Service and the Bellevue Literary Review is delighted to honor it with a number of historic photographs…”
– Danielle Ofri, Editor-in-Chief
Read Highlights from Issue 4
Each week, we’ll be highlighting one outstanding story, poem, and essay from the featured issue. We encourage you to explore more from the issue on our website or, better yet, to pick up a copy!
The Liver Nephew
by Susan Ito
Parker Katami had just come back from a four-mile run when he opened his mail—a photocopied article from the New England Journal of Medicine tucked into an envelope. He pulled it out with hot, damp hands. There were a few lines, in his uncle’s trembling, miniscule print, scribbled in the margin. Dear Nephew, it said, I must ask you for a rather large favor. The article was about a groundbreaking medical procedure called Living Donor Transplant. The favor, it turned out, was for Parker to donate half of his liver to Uncle Min.
Going South
by Natalie Pearson
My mother is in a hurry, but I’m not sure where she wants to go.
She sits up, excitedly, in the second-hand wheelchair, its armrests newly patched with packing tape, propelling herself with her good foot toward the farmhouse door. “Dammit,” she says, as her bad foot gets hung up on the ancient stove. “I want to go,” she says, ramming the sagging footrest against the oven door. “I want to go…” but the word she wants won’t come. She is halted here, aphasia trapping her words as surely as she herself is caught in this dingy, crumb-spattered kitchen.
Pausing, she starts over.
Mood Swings
by Erica Funkhouser
When criticized, she craves butter.
When praised, salt.
Sadness calls for inadequate outerwear.
Exhilaration for ultra violet.
All feelings are unhealthy.
For solitude, driving too fast.
For lack of solitude, Scotch.
Money, success and attention cure everything.
Money, success and attention make no difference at all….
Additional archival photos in this issue of BLR show the recommended home treatment of TB (pre-antibiotics), with patients taking in the fresh air on the roof of their tenements. (circa 1909). Many of these photos were taken by the legendary Jessie Tarbox Beals, the first published female photojournalist in the United States.