Sanitariums and Stigma: When TB Was Common in the U.S.

New York Times

4 days ago

Recently, the writer John Green spoke with The New York Times about his best-selling book 'Everything Is Tuberculosis' and the reason he developed an obsessive interest in the disease, which kills more people worldwide than any other infectious illness does. Tuberculosis has been rare in the United States for decades, but the conversation inspired many readers to write in to share their own families' history with the disease.
Here are excerpts from several.
My mother, Babe, had TB in the early 1930s and was put in the Grasslands sanitarium in Valhalla, N.Y. She survived because her doctor gave her pneumothorax treatment, collapsing one lung at a time, to let the lung rest and repair. She said it was very painful. I was told the story over and over. She was so afraid I would get TB.
One reason she lived is because she had met my father, Grant, on a trip to California and fallen in love. He wrote to her everyday and even said he would go east, climb the walls of the sanitarium and take her to the clean air of the mountains in California so she could get well. Grant was a writer and a stuntman in Hollywood. He had been Errol Flynn's double in 'Robin Hood.' So he really meant it when he said he'd climb the walls to get her out.
He didn't do that. But when Babe recovered, she took a train to California and married my father. Babe's doctor was Dr. William Godfrey Childress, whom I have since found out was one of the well-known TB experts in those days. I met him when she went in for a checkup many years later. (I was born when Babe was 44!)
— Wyn Lydecker
My grandfather, who immigrated from Ukraine, died at 38 from spinal TB. He left a wife and four children, and one of them, my uncle Walter, had spinal TB that left him about 5 feet tall with a hump.
My father was drafted into World War II and came back to the United States and got TB. His brother Walter paid for him to be in a sanitarium called Gaylord in Connecticut. He met my mother there and she had TB, and after two years in the san, as it was called, antibiotics were invented. My mother could take them, but my father couldn't and had to have pneumothorax for many years.
It was awful, and I am terrified about the resurgence of antibiotic-resistant TB.
— Jody Jarowey
I'm a retired M.D.-Ph.D. and I trained at Washington University in St. Louis from 1974 to 1981.
In 1980, I took the admission history for a child being admitted for a lymph node biopsy. I'm sure everyone expected cancer. As a medical student, I did a very thorough history, asking about medications (none), whether the girl was up to date on her immunizations, and whether she'd had a TB test. Her mother said 'yes.' For some reason I asked whether the TB test was positive or negative, and she then told me 'positive' and 'Oh, yes, she's on a drug for that.'
But the girl was growing, the dose hadn't been changed, and the child's uncle was on two drugs for drug-resistant TB. The multiple nodes in her neck? I can't say for sure, but the surgeons canceled the surgery when they learned of the TB.
We had been doing the admission interview in the children's playroom on the pediatric ward.
During my training I knew a fellow resident who was diagnosed with a pleural effusion. Surprise — the effusion was from TB!
As a college student I worked in the genetics building on the University of Wisconsin campus. One day everyone was told we were going to get skin tests for TB, as someone working in the building had active TB.
We don't think about TB much in the United States, but it's still here, and still killing people. The ignorance and the cruelty in our neglect of public health is shocking to me.
Now we have left the W.H.O. and shut down U.S.A.I.D. It's hard to believe we are the same people who wiped out smallpox.
— Laura J. Brown
When I was 14, a small spot was found in my right lung, and I was treated for TB in a sanitarium in Ottawa, Ill. By state law, I had to be there for six months.
The horror of this was that I was never actively contagious. I never coughed once, and no bacillus was ever found in my sputum or in the gastric lavages I underwent when they couldn't find TB in the sputum. The rules of the sanitarium were based on protocols developed at the end of the 19th century, long before the modern drugs I was treated with were discovered.
— Sandy Robertson