Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author David M. Oshinsky to Relate History of Bellevue Hospital in UMass Amherst Lecture

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David M. Oshinsky
David M. Oshinsky

AMHERST, Mass. – Author and New York University history professor David M. Oshinsky will discuss the history of New York’s Bellevue Hospital on Tuesday, April 24 at 5 p.m. when he delivers the 2018 Kathryn and Paul Williamson Lecture in the Commonwealth Honors College Events Hall at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Oshinsky’s talk will be based on his most recent book Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital, which was named the Best Book about New York City, 2016 and was a PBS Best Book of the Year.

Oshinsky will provide a historical tour of the nation’s oldest hospital. Bellevue is deeply ingrained in American popular culture as a warren of mangled crime victims, lunatics and derelicts, along with celebrity patients from bluesman Lead Belly to author Norman Mailer to John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman. It also is a place of stunning medical innovation. Bellevue created the first civilian ambulance corps, the first professional nursing school, the first outpatient clinics, the first departments of psychiatry, pediatrics, forensic medicine, even medical photography. Its doctors developed life-saving vaccines and pioneering surgeries, undertook daring and controversial human experiments and won Nobel Prizes. Virtually every disease and malady, from yellow fever in the 18th century, cholera and tuberculosis in the 19th, AIDS in the 20th, and Ebola in the 21st, has passed through its doors. Above all, however, Bellevue has been the hospital for the poor and the underserved, especially immigrants. Its ethos over three centuries remains unchanged: No one is turned away.

Director of the Division of Medical Humanities at New York University Langone Health, Oshinsky graduated from Cornell in 1965 and obtained his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1971. He won the annual Pulitzer Prize in history for his 2005 book, Polio: An American Story, which influenced Bill Gates to make polio eradication the top priority of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Oshinsky’s other books include the D.B. Hardeman Prize-winning A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, and Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for its distinguished contribution to human rights. His articles and reviews appear regularly in the New York Times, Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Established in 2000 by alumni Kathryn and Paul Williamson, the UMass Amherst lecture series brings distinguished visitors to the university to interact with Commonwealth Honors College students and give public talks. This year’s lecture is co-sponsored by Commonwealth Honors College, the School of Public Health and Health Sciences and the department of history at UMass Amherst.