Healing quest
Exhibit explores New Mexico’s role in seeking a cure for TB
NM’s role in seeking a cure for TB
The city of Albuquerque was built on breath.
The tuberculosis epidemic brought some of New Mexico’s brightest luminaries to the state:
U.S. Sen. Clinton Anderson, William Randolph Lovelace (founder of the medical center) and architect John Gaw Meem.
Billy the Kid first arrived in New Mexico when his mother sought treatment in Silver City.
Waves of desperate victims accelerated both Albuquerque’s and New Mexico’s growth through sanatoriums, boarding houses, grocery stores, banks, hospitals and, unfortunately, mortuaries and cemeteries.
Starting this weekend, the Albuquerque Museum is showing “Chasing the Cure,” an exploration of the social, political and economic impact that came with the TB scourge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exhibit chronicles the period with the help of vintage photographs, documents, patient artwork, pop culture and artifacts.
In 1901, there were seven grocery stores in Albuquerque. In 1935, there were 198. In 1901, there were seven hotels; by 1935, there were 21.
“By the early 1900s, between 40 and 60 percent of the population of Albuquerque were health seekers,” guest curator Katherine Pomonis said.
By 1910, Albuquerque’s TB death rate was seven times the national average.
Tuberculosis is an infectious disease caused by a slow-growing, rod-shaped bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This airborne pathogen passes from infected persons when they cough, sneeze or spit, invading the pulmonary system as well as other parts of the body. Today it kills an estimated 2 million people a year worldwide.
At first, the disease was misunderstood, even romanticized. It penetrated opera (“La bohème”), literature (“Crime and Punishment”) and art; in 1896 the expressionist Edvard Munch painted his sister dying of TB.
From the 1700s to the early 1900s the gaunt, fragile look of tuberculars was fashionable. Observers thought the dying patient possessed a romantic spirit led by creative gifts. This misguided assumption was especially true of artists and intellectuals, who watched as creative giants like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frederic Chopin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anton Chekhov and Emily Brontë succumbed to the disease.
After the 1826 opening of the
Santa Fe Trail, TB patients started heading to the Southwestern Plateau because they heard it described as an Eden of the West, Pomonis said. The opening of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1880 expedited the hordes of people seeking a cure. Doctors believed the dry climate and high elevation were therapeutic. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, officials thought the disease was transmitted by the poor in urban populations. Also known as consumption or the white plague, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in America in the 1800s and early 1900s.
At the height of the sanatorium movement (1902-1937), Albuquerque boasted 17 sanatoriums; the state housed 52. Doctors seeking cures for themselves raised the standard for what was essentially no medical care across the region.
There was no cure until the discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin in 1940.
“There was no health care per se at the beginning,” Pomonis said. “The people who came came because they could afford to. Those who could not lived in tents and shanties on the West Mesa.”
Santa Fe’s St. Vincent, opened in 1878 by the Sisters of Charity, was the first sanatorium in the state. In 1902, the same order opened St. Joseph in Albuquerque.
Doctors and nurses cared for their patients under a rigid schedule dictating when they awoke, ate and visited others. Many were given what became known as the Piso’s cure, essentially a cough syrup containing chloroform and cannabis.
Some patients recovered; most didn’t. As fears of contagion spread, patients were told to stay home.
“I was basically raised in Santa Fe,” Pomonus said. “My dad had a restaurant on the Plaza. The artists would come in for a cup of coffee.
“We all knew they came because of TB,” she continued, “and TB had a stigma. Parents would say, ‘Don’t do that; you might get TB’ There was a stigma that if you lived an open life. … it was like AIDS.”