“Tucson Sunshine Climate Club,” National Geographic Magazine 43, no. 3 (1923): 372.
“Many hundreds of people who come here in the last stages of pulmonary troubles recover in a short time so they are enable to engage in business.” From “Tucson as Sanitarium,” Arizona Daily Star, January 7, 1890.
Recent scholarship on epidemics has framed disease within a political or social sphere, especially in environmental history. For instance, historian Chris Gratien analyzes malaria as a “biophysical pathology of the environment.” Gratien acknowledges that the study of an epidemic and settlement “begins to shed light on the non-human factors, from climate and geological processes to animals and microbes, in historical events and why they matter for the history…” which leads to embracing “perspectives of political ecology that employ a post-positivist understanding of nature and the production about it, which views them as inseparable from social relations of power.” See Chris Gratien, “The Ottoman Quagmire: Malaria, Swamps, And Settlement in The Late Ottoman Mediterranean,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, no. 4 (2017): 584–585. Meanwhile, historian Alan Mikhail investigates the plague as an essential component of the “environment (as one component of famine, food, draught, inflation and revolt) and of life rather than as an external threat.” See Alan Mikhail, Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 111.
Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 104.
Ibid., 94.
Ibid., 110.
Until the late nineteenth century, pulmonary diseases were thought to be caused by environmental factors, hence the sick patients were not necessarily isolated from one another. They all sought cure in nature.
Through a variety of case studies, mostly from the northeast United States, the manual attempted to standardize spatial divisions, finish materials, economic costs, and expenditures. See Thomas Spees Carrington, Tuberculosis Hospital and Sanatorium Construction (New York: The National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, 1911).
Tucson Health Seekers: Design, Planning, and Architecture in Tucson for the Treatment of Tuberculosis for National Register of Historic Places (Tucson: Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation, 2012), E-10.
Mitman, Breathing Space, 110.
The contrast between central concrete sanatoria and peripheral fabric tents manifested social inequality at the scale of the body. As theorized by the sociologist Sara Grineski and her peers: “The production of inequalities can take place at the level of the body... Craddock contends that the production of bodies and disease occur simultaneously with place production and that the three cannot be separated... A sociospatial ‘sorting’ began taking place in the city as poor unproductive migrants with TB were stigmatized and excluded, while the wealthy productive healthseekers were integrated and seen as economically and culturally advantageous.” See Sara Grineski, Bob Balin, and Victor Agadjanan, “Tuberculosis and Urban Growth: Class, Race and Disease in early Phoenix, AZ,” Health & Place 12 (2006): 604.
The treatment method was modeled after Dr. August Rollier’s clinics in the Swiss Alps, which literally directed sunlight onto the skin of TB patients. See Tucson Health Seekers, E-18.
For quote from Jennifer Lestvik, see Bethany Barnes, “Historical status sought for sites TB patients used,” Arizona Daily Star, June 21, 2012, ➝.
Tucson Medical Center, Dear Patient (Tucson: Tucson Medical Center, year unknown).
Tucson Medical Center, “Your Artist,” in Dear Patient (Tucson: Tucson Medical Center, 1961–1962). Another patient handbook neutralizes the violence of settler colonialism, describing the native lands as if the white settlers had found them empty and destroyed: “This desert mesa was the stage where throve and died a high prehistoric culture. It still holds the remain of pueblos that were ruins centuries before the white man set foot on the Western continent. The Franciscan friar and the Conquistador trod the Santa Cruz valley when the founders of Jamestown and of Plymouth were still unborn. For archaeologist and historian alike, this desert country is a mine of interest.” The Desert Sanatorium and Institute of Research (Tucson: Desert Sanatorium, 1932), 7.
Grineski, Balin, and Agadjanan, “Tuberculosis and Urban Growth,” 607–609.
Robert Trennert, “The Federal Government and Indian Health in the Southwest: Tuberculosis and Phoenix East Farm Sanatorium, 1909–1955,” Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 1 (1996): 83.
Dr. F. Shoemaker, “Important Phases of the Tuberculosis Problem,” The Red Man 6, no. 9 (May 1914): 355.
Ibid., 352.