The Black Angels
The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis
Maria Smilios
Having read it
★★★★★
A true and well-researched story with good narrative and pace which steadily revealed the history of the Black nurses at the heart of Sea View, the municipal, Staten Island sanatorium that housed and treated patients of TB alongside the context of wider societal issues faced in and around early to mid twentieth-century society and the cultural attitudes and world events that were happening all made for an insightful, interesting and honest book.
One that was clearly a labour of love (taking seven years to put together) and as acknowledged, was a collaborative effort which really helps shine a light and hopefully restore a racially biased historical omission; like one of the author’s dedications says:
[...] the Black Angels courage, dedication and service to humanity helped cure one of the world’s greatest scourges, tuberculosis.
A good passage
Every day more people died: a twenty-nine-year-old in Kansas, an eighteen-year-old in Texas, a two-year-old in Oklahoma. The list kept growing. The public became outraged. Once more, the poor and Black populations had become victims of America’s failure to pass federal regulations protecting its citizens from greedy drug makers like [Dr. Samuel Evans] Massengill.
Lawmakers, doctors, and nurses had spent years calling for a complete overhaul of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Passed in 1906 as part of a progressive-era package, it was the first attempt to clean up unsanitary practices in packinghouses by inspecting meat and to protect people from quacks by regulating drugs. But thirty years later, as pharmaceutical companies began producing more drugs at quicker rates, the drug portion of the law remained unchanged. To most, it was outdated and unsafe and didn’t reflect current times. In it, there was no mention of using clinical trials, human or animal, to test drugs for safety and efficacy, and listing dosages, side effects, or ingredients on labels also wasn’t required; unless a drug was a narcotic, it could be sold without a prescription.
The few stated regulations were vague and focused specifically on advertising and misbranding. Among the violations were mislabeling and nondisclosure of potentially harmful active ingredients like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, and heroin. But these guidelines meant little: if the chemist was caught, most times the FDA gave a slap on the wrist.
[...]
Government officials knew these claims on drugs and beauty products were bogus, but patent medicine was big business; in the early 1930s, some estimated it was the fourth-largest industry in the nation. But no one, including the FDA, was powerful enough to fight the lobbyists in the patent industry. Consequently, nothing had changed, leaving the American public to trust men like Massengill, whom the FDA hoped would be honest.