The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

In 1929, New York City’s Sea View Hospital faced a critical shortage of white nurses willing to work in its tuberculosis wards. To keep the facility running, the city recruited Black nurses from the South, many of whom sought escape from Jim Crow laws. These women worked in the "death house," managing patients with a highly contagious disease before antibiotics existed. Maria Smilios follows individual nurses like Edna Sutton as they navigated racial segregation and labor strikes while assisting in the clinical trials for isoniazid, the drug that finally cured the infection.

Medical historians and readers interested in the intersection of public health and civil rights will find this account valuable. It explains how institutional racism shaped early twentieth-century healthcare and highlights the labor of women who were omitted from traditional narratives of medical triumph. Readers finish the book with a technical understanding of pre-antibiotic tuberculosis care and an account of how Black medical professionals secured labor rights while contributing to a major scientific breakthrough.