One of the most disconcerting things about the pandemic is the anti-mask faction. However motivated, refusing to wear masks is a sad demonstration of how little some Americans care about the concept of community, and the responsibility we owe to each other.
This seems even more astonishing if you look back at our own history.
In 1910, 135 out of 100,000 people died of tuberculosis in the United States. TB was spread from person to person through respiratory droplets, especially in close quarters, and if someone was poor or sick or worked in a stuffy factory, he or she was at greater risk of getting TB. (Sound familiar?)
There was no vaccine, and there would be no pharmaceutical cure until the late 1940s. But death rates had been slowly going down since the 1880s. This was partly due to ever-increasing knowledge about TB, and public health measures put in place by cities and states. But there was also a place for these sufferers to go to get a special kind of treatment, one which took them away from their families and their communities — for everyone’s good.
It was called a sanatorium, and patients went there to lie in bed, eat good food, rest and endure a few medical procedures designed to help the body’s immune system heal itself. It wasn’t a cure for TB, but what it did was keep the disease at bay, often for a lifetime.
But the sanatorium rest cure, as it was called, could take months or even years. Bed-bound TB patients could not hug their children or kiss their husbands. Sanatoriums were usually built in isolated locations, and sometimes loved ones could only visit a couple of times a month. The sanatorium cure was lonely, could be physically painful, and no one was ever guaranteed that they would get better. But it was the only hope they had, and patients knew that they were doing the right thing. Not just for themselves. But also for their communities, because if they were in that bed, they were not spreading the disease back home.
There’s a historical example of this selflessness in Marin County. In 1911, San Francisco physician Philip King Brown opened the Arequipa Sanatorium outside of Fairfax, where it treated women exclusively for 46 years. Hundreds of women went home after their time at Arequipa, cared for by doctors and nurses fully dedicated to treating tuberculosis.
But the women of Arequipa weren’t alone. Caring for a community goes both ways. The people of Fairfax, far from being worried that a building full of infectious people was just a mile out of town, did what they could to make sure the patients got what they needed. They donated magazines, books and flowers.
During World War I, food shortages meant that the patients couldn’t get fresh fruit. When they heard about this, Fairfax residents picked apples, loquats and plums from their own gardens and delivered them to the sanatorium’s kitchen. Hunters donated venison from their forays into the hills during the fall. And in an example of proper social distancing from a century ago, local girls would go to Arequipa to demonstrate the latest dance styles, while a nurse played the piano and patients sat in chairs across the room.
The sanatorium rest cure faded away by the late 1950s because of the discovery of streptomycin and other drugs which killed the TB bacteria and were a real cure. But by the time these institutions closed, only eight out of every 100,000 people died of TB; a testament to the power of isolation and self-sacrifice.
One of those Arequipa patients was my grandmother, Lois Downey. She gave 14 months of her life to protect her young son, her husband and the legion of relatives and friends waiting for her back in Sonoma. She lived to be 102 years old. She survived to become a powerful influence on my life, because she and everyone else at Arequipa put themselves aside and spent every moment fighting a disease they knew, one day, would be vanquished.
Historian Lynn Downey, of Sonoma, is a Marin County native and author of “Arequipa Sanatorium: Life in California’s Lung Resort for Women”
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September 07, 2020 at 01:31AM
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Marin Voice: Fairfax has a history of caring for sick during life-threatening times - Marin Independent Journal
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