Faculty Bibliography

ON YOUR WAY into Bellevue Hospital from First Avenue, you follow a long hallway to the lobby proper before coming upon a security desk which stands between the information desk and the elevators to the inpatient floors. When I passed this checkpoint a week after the Jan. 7 murder in the hospital of the pregnant pathologist Dr. Kathryn Hinnant, the guard by the main desk was away from his station, gazing at a poster in her memory. To all the signatures on the poster he added his own, while several disheveled people limped past him on their way to the upper floors. He returned just in time to accost a gray-haired gentleman in a suit and tie - one of the hospital's head physicians. As he had been instructed to do, the guard insisted that the man show him some identification; meanwhile, several more troubled-looking characters slipped by unchallenged. Given the kind of hospital Bellevue is, could Hinnant's murder have been prevented? Rat Man, as Steven Smith was known by many on staff before his arrest in the Hinnant murder, was an inpatient in the care of the medical service twice last December. Both times he claimed he'd taken rat poison, a complaint he knew would gain him instant, unquestioned admission because, while the poison quickly leaves the bloodstream, the patient must be observed for bleeding complications which may appear later on

''The guy's a jerk,'' he said. ''I told him what it was like here. I told him to go to a hospital in Brooklyn where he lives. Instead, he puts himself in a taxicab, chest pain and all, and drives all the way into Manhattan.'' I confronted the patient on the middle stretcher. ''What are you so damned happy about?'' I asked him. ''Traveling all the way to this madhouse from Brooklyn with a heart problem?'' The patient paused and gave me a knowing look. ''What are you talking about?'' he said. ''You think this place is something? You should see what the hospitals in Brooklyn look like.''

Marc K. Siegel reviews 'In Sickness and in Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century,' by Rosemary Stevens