Cleveland: the city of high art, high medicine, and high lead levels. Home of the amazing Cleveland Museum of Art, with its recent $350 million renovation, including a glass-enclosed atrium, the city’s largest free public space (at 39,000 square feet).
I spent the past week living in Cleveland, Ohio, in a hotel next to the Cleveland Clinic Hospital, one of our country’s premier high-end, high-tech medical complexes. It is, of course, a private health care entity. The last time I visited the Cleveland Clinic was in 1979 when I was a (blessedly only briefly) ‘cardiac patient,’ referred there by my Oberlin College clinic physician for a bothersome heart rhythm problem–probably precipitated by too much caffeine and studying of medical ethics. I remember being inside a dark brick building, and if the clinic space back then had any artwork to speak of, I certainly don’t remember it.
A few days ago, touring the art collection in the main Cleveland Clinic Hospital and guided by one of their art program curators, I was struck by how much of it is cold, clinical, and high-tech–matching, I was told, the overall branding image of the hospital system. I was standing inside the hospital space where surgeons recently had performed the first U.S.-based uterus transplant (significantly, I believe, in a married, Christian white woman and mother of adopted sons). Here are a few examples of the hospital’s prickly artwork:
Cleveland is part of the Rust Belt now, and the town’s numerous boarded-up, crumbling factory buildings and houses are testament to the city’s economic decline. Cleveland is a city of 389,524 residents, the vast majority are African-American, and 39.2 of all residents live in poverty (the median household income is $24,701). Not surprisingly, the health care sector is Cleveland’s largest employer, with the arts also being a leading industry. (Source: Data USA from the MIT Media Lab–a great source of up-to-date and easy-to-use data visualization based on US government databases.)
When I checked into the Cleveland hotel at the start of my health humanities conference, a middle-aged white man from Germany was carrying a large container of bottled water. When I asked him about it he told me he’d read that Cleveland’s water supply was not safe and contained high lead levels, so he was buying his own water. He also told me he had flown in to be treated at the Cleveland Clinic.
Indeed, Cleveland has one of our nation’s worst problems with lead ‘poisoning’ but mainly from lead paint in deteriorating inner-city housing. The Cleveland neighborhood of Glenville, only blocks north of the Cleveland Clinic, had a 2014 study of lead levels in children under age 6 showing that 26.5% had levels exceeding the current CDC threshold of 5 micrograms per deciliter. (Source: NYT article “Flint is in the news, but lead poisoning is even worse in Cleveland” by Michael Wines, March 3, 2016.) Lead, as we know quite well by now, at any level is a brain poison that permanently decreases IQ and interferes with a person’s ability to control impulses. A different spin on the “No Child Left Behind Act.”
This photograph, taken from the top floor of the Cleveland Clinic Hospital and looking north towards Lake Erie, shows the downtown skyline to the left, and to the right (the darker, low-lying area) is the Glenville neighborhood. As I stood gazing at the Cleveland skyline from atop this very antiseptic and removed private hospital, I couldn’t help but wonder how anyone can possibly believe in trickle-down economics. To me it is the ultimate of self-serving delusions. 