Recalling Cocoanut Grove
https://web.archive.org/web/20170324200826/http://cache.boston.com/news/daily/21/archives_cocoanut_052592.htm

At BCH reunion, doctors discuss horror and heroics of fire tragedy

By M. R. Montgomery, Globe Staff, 5/25/1992

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Dr. Stanley Levenson, then just a year out of Harvard Medical School, came to work at City on Nov. 18, 1942, as a young researcher in a unique role. City, with funds from the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development, had contracted to investigate methods of treating burn victims. The war was under way, and Pearl Harbor was proof that burns were the great enemy for civilian and military alike. Of all City's unusual practices, the "burn service" was the strangest. The burn service would be in charge of the study and the treatment of any burn patient, in any of the three medical schools' surgical services, as well as in the hospital's own surgical service and in the pediatric service at the then-new Curley building.

"I remember well," Levenson told a group of fellow City alumni, "that Thanksgiving Day: We had a wonderful meal in the hospital, and then I came down with food poisoning," an anecdote that brought knowing laughter from an audience that had survived years of City food. "I was still in bed on Saturday night, when I got a call from Dr. Charles Lund, chief of surgery, and he told me that no matter how I felt, I had to get to ER immediately, something terrible had happened.

"By the time I got there, two house officers were already at the door, sorting the patients into living and dead, stacking the dead along one side of the hall, the living on the other. Two more house officers were evaluating the living, giving morphine, directing them to surgeries. At one point, it has been calculated, we were receiving a patient every 11 seconds."

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