Video: Sanatorium Scenes

I guess this video is just a start on the TB story in America. I think you jump too fast from Dr Koch to the sanatoria in Colorado. If I’m not mistaken, Dr Trudeau established the first Sanatorium in this country at Lake Placid, N.Y. with an early resident in the late 1880’s, Robert Louis Stevenson. You should also be making the point in the Colorado segment that it wasn’t the “good air” there that was providing the “cure” but the opportunity for the body to rest and the lung to heal itself. Now with the Tubercle Bacillus making a drug-resistance comeback, this is still an important treatment option when the drugs fail.

I was one of the last people hospitalized for TB at a sanatorium in NY state (Bedford Hills) in 1954-55, after contracting it a few years before from a roomate in my junior year at Harvard.

Good luck in the remainder of this fascinating story.

Carl Wagner

Carl makes a good point about the history of sanatoria: the first in America was indeed established by Dr. Trudeau in Saranac Lake, N.Y., near Lake Placid. This whole story is told in ON THE LAKE — it just didn’t make the superbly edited video Harvard Magazine put together. No excerpt can cover an hour-long film.

As for fresh air and rest being an important treatment option in an age of drug-resistant TB, not really. Three leading TB doctors who are in the film (one from Johns Hopkins, another from Brown University and the third fro, U. Colorado) all speak of the need for more effective drugs and regimens, but none put any faith in sanatoria-style treatment.

I’m almost speechless. All my life I’ve heard of the TB sanitorium in Rhode Island, but didn’t have any information about the whereabouts or the proper name. I’ve seen many old photos of it because my mother and older sister had been patients there during the 1940’s for a few years.

My sister never had TB, but was kept there because my mother had it, and also my sister tested positive but never developed it. It was believed then that it was a preventive measure to keep her there in a hospital bed most of the time, so she would not develop it, also. My sister was only three years old at the time, and she was kept in a children’s ward with all ages of other children. She rarely got to visit my mother during those 2-3 years they were there. It was heart-wrenching for my mother, not knowing if she would survive the TB to ever see my sister again.

My mother had her lung removed, was told she very well might die, but the antibiotics that cured TB were being used on the first patients then. My mother was lucky to have been one of those first patients that received it and she survived.

If not for the invention of the miraculous antibiotic that cured TB, I would not have been born later and be here today to tell the story.

Thank you so much for posting this info about the movie. My sister found the website and told me about it. Our mother passed away a few years ago, but would have been very pleased to know the movie is being made so the story of so many precious lives could be told.