Left behind

In 1963, the Dutch writer Jan de Hartog moved to the United States to teach a course at the University of Houston and began volunteering at Jefferson Davis, ...

He makes a counterintuitive case for viewing the resource-choked Ben Taub as a model for a more equitable health care system. As both writer and doctor, Nuila finds inspiration in Anton Chekhov, who worked as a physician even as he wrote short stories and plays. To return to his roots as a healer, the elder Nuila volunteered once a month at Ben Taub. Linda Villarosa is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine whose work focuses on race and health. Nuila explains that his experience as a student at Ben Taub made him a better doctor and burnished his C.V. He begins with Stephen, the manager at a burger chain who enrolled in a company insurance plan so bare-bones that he had to prepay the ER where he was diagnosed with cancer. In “The People’s Hospital,” Ricardo Nuila, a practicing physician and associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine, focuses on Ben Taub, the hospital that succeeded Jefferson Davis as Houston’s publicly funded flagship. Nuila, a skillful writer whose fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Guernica and the “Best American Short Stories” anthology, instead takes the time to work backward as he describes the plights of people he has cared for. What de Hartog saw at that hospital became the basis of his scathing 1964 book, “The Hospital.” Along with the slap-in-the-face insult of Black residents forced to seek care at a facility named after the president of the Confederacy, the place was, in de Hartog’s words, a “monument of misery.” As he walked the overcrowded corridors of the hospital, on floors slippery with vomit and blood, he saw patients in various states of undress, some in wheelchairs, a mass of “human wrecks, sagging, hopeless personifications of utter misery.” It was the smell that shocked him most. He humanizes his points in meticulous and compassionate detail through focusing primarily on the stories of five Ben Taub patients. He compared it to the foul odor that had hit him when, after World War II, during which he had been part of the Dutch resistance, he encountered the returning inmates of Nazi prison camps: “the all-pervading, overpowering stench of poverty, sickness, neglect, unwashed feet, unwashed clothes, foul breath, the stench of vomit and diarrhea.” He learned that in Houston it had a name: the “J.D. At the core of “The People’s Hospital,” Nuila, a Houston native who has spent more than a decade as a medical student, resident and now attending physician at Ben Taub, asks a simple but profound question: “Why do some people benefit from health care in America, while others are excluded?” His answer is equally simple: Because the principal goal of the American health care system is to make money, period.