12 Years a Slave · written by John Ridley and Steve McQueen · 2013

In a crowded, unsanitary ward, Black patients with smallpox are stripped, given gowns, and surrounded by sparse staff as a bell tolls.

Scene 79 of 211 · ≈ 1 min on screen · Act one

Act oneAct twoAct three

Begins 49 min into a 2:22 film

The story so farBefore scene 79

After being kidnapped from New York and sold into slavery, Solomon Northup uses his skills and carefully placed trust to survive and seek a way back to his family.

Scenes 1–29
Solomon lives freely in Saratoga as a husband, father, worker, and musician.
Scenes 30–65
Kidnapped and held under the imposed name Platt, Solomon must preserve his life and identity.
Just before
Scene 76
Dr. Carr drives Solomon, Eliza, Clemens, John, and other sick captives in a wagon toward treatment.
Scene 77
At Charity Hospital, the arrivals see carpenters making rows of coffins behind the building.
Scene 78
The group enters a hospital that sounds and feels more like a place for dying than recovery.
Scene 79
This scene

79INT. HOSPITAL/PATIENTS WARD - LATER

It is a large and not particularly sanitary room filled with row after row of beds. Nearly all the beds are filled with patients of both sexes and all ages. In this ward, ALL THE PATIENTS ARE BLACK, and all are suffering from smallpox. There is very little treatment going on. Mostly the patients are being made "comfortable," though even that is relative.

With a few WHITE NURSES - but mostly BLACK WARDS - looking on the slaves are stripped of their clothing and given hospital gowns to wear. As they dress, the group hears THE TOLL OF A BELL.