Ambulance notes of a Bellevue Hospital intern: May 1938

In 1938, as a New York University/Bellevue Hospital intern, I recorded notes on the 384 cases I saw during my 1-month ambulance duty. Although I intended to use them to follow up the clinical course of patients I admitted to Bellevue, the long hours and pressure of work made this ambitious goal unachievable. Sixty years later, after retirement from academic medicine and medical practice at New York University School of Medicine, I found the long-lost notes among my papers. They are of historic interest since they provide insight into aspects of primary and emergency medicine of the era when the therapeutic efficacy of the sulfanilamide class of agents was under investigation, a unique view of the life of an intern just before interns were replaced on ambulances by technicians, and a glimpse of the surprising character of several neighborhoods of pre-World War II Manhattan. The notes also provide the basis for a current analysis of case incidence and treatment by disease category. A description of the confluence of social, economic, and political forces that led to the establishment of the Bellevue Hospital Ambulance Service, the first such urban service in the world, is included.