Book Review

Forgotten Ellis Island: The Extraordinary Story of America's Immigrant Hospital

N Engl J Med 2008; 358:1202-1203March 13, 2008

Article

Forgotten Ellis Island: The Extraordinary Story of America's Immigrant Hospital
By Lorie Conway. 185 pp., illustrated. New York, Smithsonian Books, 2007. $26.95. ISBN: 978-0-06-124196-3

Seen from the air, Ellis Island resembles a letter U anchored in the Hudson River. The right arm of the U contains the Great Hall — the iconic building where prospective immigrants were screened. In most cases, they were able to leave the island for mainland America. Millions of immigrants were processed through the Great Hall from when it opened in 1900 until 1954, when Ellis Island ceased operations. The building reopened in 1990 as an immigration museum and now attracts some 2 million visitors a year. The Great Hall, quite rightly, has become a shrine.

But the left arm of the U was neglected until very recently. The hospital facilities, separated by a narrow walkway from the rest of the island, were located there, and it was the place where immigrants who were diagnosed with mental or physical illness were confined to prevent them from spreading disease to the American population. Today it is still remote, and tourists are forbidden to enter.

Efforts are now under way to restore this section and open it to the public. The hospital buildings that were crumbling from neglect have been stabilized, and it is hoped that the site can become a medical museum. Lorie Conway, who has been a part of that effort, produced a video documentary on the subject, as well as this book.

Forgotten Ellis Island is not a scholarly history of the hospital. Instead, it is designed for a general audience, with lots of illustrations and large type. On that basis, it succeeds admirably. Conway writes sympathetically of the anxiety and bewilderment of the men, women, and children who were pulled out of lines in the Great Hall and taken to the hospital. The eye disease trachoma, which ultimately leads to blindness, was particularly difficult for many immigrants to comprehend. Persons who were diagnosed with this condition but who were not yet visually impaired often could not fathom why they were being denied admittance to the nation they had endured so much to enter.

Conway is also critical of the treatment of those who were diagnosed with mental illness and confined to the section of the hospital known as the Psychopathic Pavilion. Care of the mentally ill in the early 20th century was primitive and based to a large degree on eugenic theories about the mental superiority of Western Europeans. There was strong public opinion that America was in grave peril from the influx of hordes of the genetically feebleminded from eastern and southern Europe. Conway concludes that the deportation rate of patients who were deemed to be mentally impaired was excessive.

These criticisms aside, Conway praises the treatment that was provided to immigrants by the hospital. An early commissioner of immigration instructed the staff that “immigrants shall be treated with kindness and consideration,” and the book presents evidence that this was indeed the general practice. The hospital offered a lending library, educational programs, religious services, and entertainment that included theatrical productions and musical performances. Children were given toys, candy, and lessons in English. The wards, according to Conway, were mostly “a model of advanced medicine,” with clean, open conditions and the latest medical equipment. She praises the doctors and nurses of the Public Health Service, who provided care as good as any that was available to American citizens in hospitals on the mainland.

Forgotten Ellis Island provides a generally positive picture of the hospital and succeeds in making what happened there part of the lore of the Ellis Island shrine. In our own era, when immigration is being demonized in some quarters, a book such as this one that presents the human side of the immigrant experience for a general audience is not a bad thing.

Marc Mappen, Ph.D.
New Jersey Historical Commission, Trenton, NJ 08625
marc.mappen@sos.state.nj.us