If you are ever sick, the island at the heart of the city is the place to be. Out my window, as I write, I can see the sign of a hospital, all of three blocks away, behind the church steeple and across the park. You could get there faster on foot than it would take to hail a cab. Rolling up the river, there is another hospital every mile or so. They have their counterparts on the island’s opposite coast, as if it had been folded lengthwise to make a medical inkblot. The most characteristic city-street sound, over the all-hours rumble and hum, is the stab of ambulances, pulsing through blocked intersections and around double-parked trucks. Where do people in the other boroughs take their ills and injuries? Who knows? They can always come here.
I know where the sick in the country go: far away. A friend’s health took a hit recently. In the country, when you look out your window what you see is trees, and maybe a neighbor. There is an urgent-care facility — a stopgap, the civilian equivalent of medics in old WWII-themed TV shows — in his town, and two small hospitals in a small city to the north, and a third in another small city across the river to the east. What hit my friend was beyond the capacities of these places; he had to go to the state capital.
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