Bellevue Hospital, on New York City's East Side, occupies a colorful and horrifying place in the public imagination: a den of mangled crime victims, vicious psychopaths, assorted derelicts, lunatics and exotic-disease sufferers. In its two and a half centuries of service, there was hardly an epidemic or social catastrophe --- or groundbreaking scientific advance --- that did not touch Bellevue. David Oshinsky chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and, in so doing, also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution.