Scholars describe the one-drop rule - the idea that any African ancestry makes a person black - as the American regime of race. While accounts of when the rule emerged vary widely, ranging from the 1660s to the 1920s, most legal scholars have assumed that once established, the rule created a bright line that people were bound to follow. This Article reconstructs the one-drop rule’s meaning and purpose from 1600 to 1860, setting it within the context of racial migration, the continual process by which people of African descent assimilated into white communities. Read more »
A woman who died unnoticed on a hospital floor in a scene recorded by security cameras was killed by blood clots caused by a long period of physical inactivity, according to the city’s medical examiner.
Esmin Green, 49, had been sitting in a waiting room at the city-owned Kings County Hospital Center for nearly 24 hours when she collapsed from her chair and slowly died on June 19.
She lay on the floor at the Brooklyn hospital for an hour before a nurse finally checked her pulse.
After an autopsy and weeks of tests, the medical examiner’s office concluded Friday that Green was killed by pulmonary thromboemboli, blood clots that form in the legs and travel through the bloodstream to the lungs.
The medical examiner said the clots were due to “deep venous thrombosis of lower extremities due to physical inactivity,” complicating an underlying psychological illness: chronic paranoid schizophrenia.
An attorney for Green’s family, Sanford Rubenstein, said the finding suggested that the hours she sat in the hospital played a role in her death.
“The length of time that she spent in the emergency room … very well may have contributed to her death,” he said. “Physical inactivity was obviously a significant contributing factor.”
The city Health and Hospitals Corp., which owns the hospital, had no immediate comment Friday.
HHC officials have previously expressed outrage at the way Green was treated. Six employees lost their jobs over the incident, even before it became public.
Green died while awaiting care in the hospital’s psychiatric emergency room. EMS workers had brought her to the center on the morning of June 18. The hospital said she was suffering from agitation and psychosis and was involuntarily admitted after refusing medical review.
The emergency room is chronically overcrowded, and Green waited overnight for further care.
A recording of her death prompted national outrage when it became public last week.
After she collapsed, neither fellow patients nor the hospital’s staff moved to help her, even as she thrashed her legs on the floor and tried to get up.
Two security guards and a member of the hospital’s medical staff can be seen on the video, stopping to look at Green briefly before walking away. She stopped moving about 30 minutes after falling and was dead when a nurse finally examined her another 30 minutes after that.
HHC immediately reported the death to the state and voluntarily turned over the security records to lawyers already suing the city over alleged patient neglect at the hospital.
Rubenstein said that had Green been carefully attended to when she arrived at the emergency room, doctors might have noticed swelling in her legs and taken action.
People known to be at risk from deep vein thrombosis are often given anticoagulation drugs or compression stockings, which can keep clots from forming, and advised not to sit for hours at a time.
The condition, however, is not always easy to detect. The National Heart Lung and Blood Institute said about half of the people with deep vein thrombosis have no symptoms at all.
Airlines often advise passengers on very long flights to stroll the aisle, periodically, to prevent blood clots.
People do not care about the needs of the mentally ill.
This report from the Associated Press:
Video from a surveillance camera at a Brooklyn, New York, hospital shows a woman dying on the floor of a psychiatric emergency room while people nearby ignore her.
She lies facedown on the floor, then thrashes before going still.
About an hour passed before someone realized what was happening and tried to help.
The agency that runs the municipal hospital — the city’s Health and Hospitals Corp. — fired several staffers as a result.
The video was released Monday by lawyers suing Kings County Hospital.
The lawsuit alleges neglect and abuse of mental health patients at the facility.
The video shows the 49-year-old woman keeling over and falling out out of her chair on June 19.
I’m sure it goes without saying that we’re all disgusted by this video, and this report. This woman was face down on the floor for more than 45 minutes, and folks barely blinked. What kind of a world do we live in where someone falling to the ground has no impact? In a hospital no less?
I’ve seen some comments that basically say “oh well”.
Let that be your mother, or sister, or daughter and see how much you shrug your shoulders then. This is a problem. A HUGE problem across this country. People do not care about the mentally ill. Folks seem content to just toss them aside. The only place they are treated worse is in our criminal justice system.
Black patients with diabetes do worse than white patients — even when they’re getting treatment from the same doctor. That’s the message of a new study published this week in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine. It’s not the first paper to document health disparities between black and white diabetics, but it breaks new ground: By looking at the outcome discrepancy among a group of patients with access to the same health facilities — 90 Massachusetts physicians working in 14 health centers — the new study rules out the explanation that black patients, by virtue of being poorer, are excluded from seeing the better quality doctors to which their white counterparts are more likely to have access.
I spent the morning of Friday the 13th paying bills and shopping for my son’s birthday. I came home, came through the door and heard the answering machine beeping. A check of the caller ID showed 2 calls from my best friend Josie, one from the cell and one from her house.
But, we don’t usually leave each other messages, because we know how we are. We both have caller ID and pretty much leave it at that. But anyway, her message starated with “This is Josie, I don’t know if you’ve seen the news…”
I am not a morning person. I never will be. I love my bed. Hell, I love the couch too. My favorite pillow, my favorite blanket, and the cat.
But I would set two alarm clocks on Sunday morning to watch Tim Russert. Particularly for the past six months. Watching Tim wasn’t necessarily about watching things that were just ‘newsworthy’. No, with Tim, it was greater than that. Tim wasn’t just a journalist sitting back and observing the political process, he was more than that. He was a part of the political process.
Did he make mistakes? Sure, he probably did, every one does. But if you want to talk about excellence, Tim Russert comes to mind.
“Tim Russert died today”, Josephine said through my machine, “I can’t even stand it, I talked to mom…I knew when I saw Tom come on that something had happened…”
I grabbed the phone and sort of just sunk down on the couch.
Josie loves Tim Russert, I mean just loves him to pieces. Any time anything happens, she turns to Tim. After a debate, she turns to Tim. After an election, she turns to Tim. New polling data comes out, she turns to Tim.
He is trusted. I know that I trust him because he’s tough. Not Bill O’Reilly tough, real tough.
I called Josie back, and went to MSNBC.com’s live feed of their coverage.
Heart atack.
At the office.
Son graduating college.
Had been on vacation in Italy…
We sat on the phone for about an hour, watching.
Who on earth could take on Meet the Press, after Tim, we wondered to each other. We shared some favorite highlights. This is my most recent one. When Tim Russert made these remarks, he was doing more than just observing, he was declaring victory for Barack Obama. It’s a moment I will never forget.
When Tim spoke, the peons who could only dream of reaching his calaber, got in line, and did so quickly. When Hillary Clinton was hemming and hawing about when to exit, if she would exit, and everyone in the media pounced on her Tuesday and Saturday speech, Tim gave her room. He gave her dignity…and everyone followed.
I loved watching him do his thang. You could tell, always tell that he loved his job, he loved the people he worked with, he loved politics, he loved journalism.
He was afraid to get tough, he wasn’t afraid to verbally corner someone into either giving up an answer or looking like an ass.
I know, I know. You didn’t like the way ho co-moderated that Obama/Clinton debate. I didn’t either. But at the same time, and I was aware of this while watching it. He did Obama and all of us a favor, because he is so trusted. He vetted the bullshit for everyone to see. Once he was done, those “issues” swirling around Obama became non-issues. Why?
Because Tim Russert handled it.
The death of Tim is a loss for everyone.
Sure, Meet the Press will have a new moderator, and the DC NBC offices will have a new Chief, and life will go on, and the news will go on.
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Sable Verity
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. -Barack Obama
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.
~George Washington Carver
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.
~Frederick Douglass
Sable
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