How do we face the death of a beloved parent? We turn to our friends and family to cope but often they aren't up to the difficult task of coping and caring for a demanding patient. Paying for medical care can be a nightmare as treatment is withheld unless funds are forthcoming.
"Before the entitled lived here exclusively, the marginalized died in droves." Founded in 1849 to care for indigent immigrants in Greenwich Village, St. Vincent's Hospital was sold in 2010 to create multi-million-dollar homes. In its 161 years of existence, the legendary institution treated survivors of the Titanic, tended to victims of both World Trade Center attacks, and served as Ground Zero of the AIDS Crisis. With honesty, humor, and flights of historical fancy, GHOSTS OF ST. VINCENT'S tells the hospital's story through the eyes of a man who spent a winter on its 7th floor AIDS ward and survived just in time for the drug "cocktail" that saved so many lives. Featuring appearances by indomitable icons (from Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Mapplethorpe, Sidney Lumet to Vito Russo, Ed Koch and The Ramones), GHOSTS OF ST. VINCENT'S explores coming out and coming back from the dead, gender fluidity and gentrification, the price of forgiveness, the cost of survival, and the ephemeral nature of New York City.
This rich history chronicles the prominent role of Catholic women religious in establishing the hospitals at the core of New York City's extensive Catholic medical network. Beginning with the opening of St. Vincent's Hospital in 1849, Bernadette McCauley relates how determined and pragmatic women of faith worked over the next eighty years to place the Catholic Church in the mainstream of American medicine. Exploring the differences and similarities between Catholic hospitals and other hospitals, McCauley describes the particular cultural sensibility and management style that informed Catholic health care and gauges the ultimate success of Catholic efforts. Visionary sisters established, managed, and staffed the hospitals, and they sat on hospital boards and served as administrators at a time when women rarely occupied positions of leadership in business. McCauley illustrates how they at once embraced the world of God and the world of man, playing an unheralded role in the development of the modern hospital while serving the daily needs of New York's immigrant poor. Encompassing such issues as immigration, the education of nurses and doctors, hospital care and organization, and the role of women in the Catholic church, this extensive study is a valuable resource for scholars and students in the history of medicine, history of nursing, American religion, and women's history.
Covering an exhaustive range of information about the five boroughs, the first edition of The Encyclopedia of New York City was a success by every measure, earning worldwide acclaim and several awards for reference excellence, and selling out its first printing before it was officially published. But much has changed since the volume first appeared in 1995: the World Trade Center no longer dominates the skyline, a billionaire businessman has become an unlikely three-term mayor, and urban regeneration—Chelsea Piers, the High Line, DUMBO, Williamsburg, the South Bronx, the Lower East Side—has become commonplace. To reflect such innovation and change, this definitive, one-volume resource on the city has been completely revised and expanded. The revised edition includes 800 new entries that help complete the story of New York: from Air Train to E-ZPass, from September 11 to public order. The new material includes broader coverage of subject areas previously underserved as well as new maps and illustrations. Virtually all existing entries—spanning architecture, politics, business, sports, the arts, and more—have been updated to reflect the impact of the past two decades. The more than 5,000 alphabetical entries and 700 illustrations of the second edition of The Encyclopedia of New York City convey the richness and diversity of its subject in great breadth and detail, and will continue to serve as an indispensable tool for everyone who has even a passing interest in the American metropolis.