THE VIEW FROM THE VUE

THE VIEW FROM THE VUE, Larry's tongue-in-cheek recounting of a young doctor's life at New York's Bellevue Hospital, was originally published in hardcover (1976) and paperback (1977). Bellevue, the largest of The Apple's city hospitals, was the medical court of last resort. When the staff at another city hospital could not cope with a particular patient, a doctor had only to write "Transfer to Bellevue," and the problem was solved . . . for the transferring institution.

Bellevue was a crisis-oriented place, most of whose patients were truly good and sick. Then as now, poor people did not have much truck with preventive medicine, thereby giving their diseases a generous head start before they dragged themselves in for care. And where did these disease-ravaged people go for help when the inevitable could be put off no longer? To an institution chronically short of critical equipment, nurses, and aides, whose physical facilities seemed to sag in response to the weight they were forced to bear. No wonder Bellevue was the setting for innumerable astonishing episodes of peculiar, eccentric, and downright zany behavior.

 

Patients and staff alike were subjected to pressures capable of taxing minds beyond the limits of tolerance; and to survive in that unusual environment sometimes required behavior which, viewed dispassionately, would have to be classified as something other than normal. Try to keep this in mind if the view from The Vue seems . . . well, just a little distorted here and there.

What Others Are Saying...

" . . . entertaining, colorful recall . . . The 'Vue' welcomed anyone: addicts, Bowery bums, fanatics, women with post-abortion complications, the neighborhood's LOJLs (little old Jewish ladies). The patients were often visited by junkies and hookers plying their trades . . . " (Publishers Weekly).

" . . . the most side-splitting fact book I've ever read . . . this could be a great Broadway play experience - or television series . . . proof that truth is much funnier and stranger than fiction . . . I'd love to meet a doctor like this one who sees the oddball side in everything . . . " (JRG Newsletter)