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
BLR‘s early home was in the iconic Bellevue Hospital, which has often been associated with its treatment of mentally ill patients. So it was only fitting that our second theme issue was “Landscapes of the Mind: Writers Explore Mental Illness,” which focused on the broad continuum of the mind and its maladies.
Of course, Bellevue is so much more than its reputation as a mental hospital. It is a full-spectrum medical center—the oldest in the United States!— with everything from pediatrics and public health to microsurgery and Level 1 emergency services. (There’s even a primary care clinic, where our editor-in-chief spends most of her daylight hours.)
From the Foreword
“In medicine, we tend to think of certain biological events as impressively complex, such as the role of sodium channels in heart rhythm disturbances. But when viewed from the lens of psychiatry, these molecular interactions seem rather simple. An aberrant heart rhythm is a straightforward electrochemical process. An aberrant thought process, however—hallucination, delusion, personality disorder, psychotic break, impaired judgment, lack of insight—is far harder to dissect. Of course, the scientific strides over the last century have changed the face of psychiatry and we have a much greater understanding of the biological underpinnings of many mental illnesses. Nonetheless, deciphering the anomalies of the mind and brain remain challenging.”
– Danielle Ofri, Editor-in-Chief
Read Highlights from Issue 11
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!
In Lieu of a Better Plan
by Elizabeth Downs
In lieu of a better plan, one otherwise pleasant evening at the asylum, as the sun descends and both the faculty and my colleagues here flock to the cafeteria preoccupied by their desire for Jello squares, I—a known murderess and recently declared Vice President of Ward G—escape through a partially opened, third-story window. A fork is duct-taped to my inner thigh and the pockets of my housecoat are packed to the hilt with birdseed.
It’s not as simple as it sounds.
Iambic Pentameter and the Meter of War
by Diane Cameron
In the 1940’s, a young Marine returns from China to a small Pennsylvania town. He enrolls in graduate school and begins to work as a high school teacher. He marries the young woman who had waited for him through the war. They buy a house and invite her widowed mother to live with them.
One year later finds the body of the mother-in-law sprawled on the kitchen floor and the body of the wife in the living room, both perforated with bullets. The former Marine is handcuffed and taken away by the sheriff. The local newspapers are filled with testimony from the man’s former employers, neighbors and students. Each interview is a tribute to the good worker, teacher and neighbor they knew Donald Watkins to be.
After more than 30 years of hospitalization, Donald Watkins married my mother. He was 84; she was a younger woman of 70. For a decade Donald was part of my life. He was a gentle and reserved man, whose past always seemed like it must belong to someone else.
Thanksgiving: Visiting My Brother on the Ward
by Peter Schmitt
Behind the thick, crosshatched glass of the cruiser,
my brother, back for the holiday, breathes
more slowly. A phalanx of uniforms
cloaks the open door, murmuring to him
where he sits. The carving knife is somewhere
out of reach, none of us so much as scratched.
Inside, the bound bird cools on the butcher block.
Later that night I move through many doors, each
locking behind me, each inlaid with the same
heavy glass as the squad car. Through the last
I see my brother’s face, fixed as on a graph,
ordinate, abscissa….
Bellevue Hospital Insane Pavilion, c. 1910
The almshouse in Lower Manhattan that became Bellevue Hospital, had, in its 1736 mandate, a commitment to care for “the aged, infirm, the unruly and the maniac.” However, when Bellevue was officially declared a hospital in 1825, the ancillary functions were parceled out to other institutions. In 1829, the City of New York purchased Blackwell Island (now Roosevelt Island) in the East River, and erected a penitentiary, an almshouse, a workhouse, a smallpox hospital, and, in 1839, the New York Lunatic Asylum. Bellevue’s prisoners, poor, and mentally ill, were sent to these respective institutions.
Meanwhile, in 1879, Bellevue had built its own Insane Pavilion on the main campus of the hospital on East 26th Street. The creation of a dedicated space within a medical hospital for the treatment of mental illness was revolutionary at the time. The cover photo of this issue of BLR was taken in the Bellevue Insane Pavilion around 1910.
(Photo courtesy of Bellevue Hospital Archives)