New York's Bellevue Hospital has launched its own literary review. Not even the Times can keep a straight face about this. After quite properly noting that NYU spent $20,000 to finance the Bellevue Literary Review as part of a nationwide movement to enhance the quality of medical education by using "literature to teach doctors how to write better and clearer case histories and to empathize more with patients," the author thoroughly enjoys the irony of Bellevue's artistic aspirations:

But it seems fitting that Bellevue Hospital, where writers have been committed in the extremes of mental collapse and which is at the center of American cultural life, would have a literary magazine. Malcolm Lowry set part of his novel "Lunar Caustic" in Bellevue after being committed to its psychiatric ward for observation. Part of Billy Wilder's movie "The Lost Weekend," which starred Ray Milland as an alcoholic, takes place at the hospital.

And among the writers who spent time as patients there are Norman Mailer, after he stabbed his wife, Adele, in 1960; William Burroughs, after he cut off his fingertip and gave it to a boyfriend; and the poet Delmore Schwartz, after he attacked the art critic Hilton Kramer, who he thought was having an affair with his wife. The playwright Eugene O'Neill and the poet Gregory Corso also spent time at Bellevue in stages of nervous breakdowns. The novelist Walker Percy was an intern there but left medicine after contracting tuberculosis.

Now that the Bellevue doctors-in-training are being taught to present a patient's case history as "a mystery story, a narrative that unfolds full of surprises, exposing the vulnerability at the human core," does this mean that the inmates are running the asylum?