No hospital in American history has been the source of more lore, whispers, and tabloid exposés than New York’s Bellevue. David Oshinsky’s well-researched historical account, Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital (Doubleday, $30), makes for reading as compelling as any true-crime thriller. The author of Polio and Worse than Slavery, Oshinksy delves bravely into all the corridors of Bellevue’s past.  On the one hand Bellevue was one of the largest hospitals in American history and housed many of the best medical researchers, attending physicians, and professional nurses of the nineteenth century. On the other, it was viewed as a “bare-bones receptacle for the poorest of the poor, the dregs of society, the semi-criminal, starving, unwelcome class, who suffer and die unrecognized.” An absorbing topic, no doubt, and when you package it with Oshinsky’s easy writing style, you’ll spend hours engrossed in this book only to emerge wondering where the time has gone.