New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nurse shortage.
So begins the remarkable true story of the Black nurses who helped cure tuberculosis, one of the world''s deadliest plagues, told alongside the often strange chronicle of the cure''s discovery.
During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed 1 in 7 people, white nurses at Sea View, New York''s largest municipal hospital, began quitting. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed facility, dubbed ''the pest house'' where ''no one left alive''.
Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this story follows the intrepid yo
