Tuberculosis in Albuquerque

Part 1- Chasing the Cure to the Heart of Well Country

A little experience is worth more than much theory, and the experience of hundreds whose testimony would cheerfully be given shows that the climatic conditions existing in this part of the country will undoubtedly cure consumption in its earlier stages…
-Albuquerque Illustrated, NM, January 1892

So who’ll be next, who’ll be next
As this bright new year rolls round
To be laid out in a gorgeous shroud
In his casket underground?

In Fairview on the hill
There’s a tiny lot we’ll save
We feel It will
Just fill the bill
While you will fill the grave

-“The Undertaker’s Refrain”, The Killgloom Gazette, Vol 1, Issue 1, Jan. 1914


They called it “The White Plague”, and, according to a U.S. Public Health Service report, in 1913, 50% of Albuquerque’s population either had it, or shared their household with someone who did. 90% of those sufferers were born in other states and had fled west at the instruction of their doctors, and the city’s population was exploding as a result. Central Avenue, which had begun life as Railroad and would later enter its golden age as US 66, was now granted another name by a wryly macabre populace: Tuberculosis Avenue, lined by the sanatoriums that were rapidly coming to define the city in the eyes of the world .

For over a century, the tuberculosis epidemic had ravaged through American and European society. The disease spread quickly and mysteriously, its symptoms (bloody cough, fever, chills and a rapidly wasting physique) were debilitating, lingering, and almost always fatal. Disconcertingly, it seemed often to affect the young and otherwise healthy, and wealth or class provided no barrier to its onset. The science of the day had yet to find a cure and instead grasped at straws: in desperation doctors prescribed thrice daily bleedings, marathon horseback rides and a myriad other red herring “treatments” that did little besides distract, and weaken, the patient.

In the late 1800s a medical fad called "climatology" caused multitudes of ailing easterners to forsake their homes in order to "chase the cure" into the newly opened West. According to the precepts of the theory, the spread of tuberculosis was linked to the humid, hot airs of sea level environs, the damp soil of the eastern states responsible for the disease's escalating assault. Conversely, promoters of the theory pronounced that the dry, cool breezes of the high mountain deserts of the exotic Southwest would surely dry out the lungs, and thus cure the ailment. Perhaps thrilled to have an excuse to unload their dying and contagious patients, doctors eagerly ordered them to “go west.” And if the patients had the means to, they complied.

For many of them, “west” meant New Mexico, and quite often, Albuquerque. "Take a map and place one point of a compass on Albuquerque, New Mexico, and with the other describe a circle which will touch the Mexican border, west Texas, southern Colorado and eastern Arizona. Within that circle, you have what may be termed the health country, with Albuquerque as its heart. If you are in search of health, the nearer you live to the heart of the health country, the better chance you have of getting well," stated an unnamed writer in the pages of The Sanatorium Quarterly. “Without exception Albuquerque has the finest climate the year around to be found in the United States. New Mexico is the world’s sanitarium for consumptives and Albuquerque, by scientific observation, is the dryest and most healthful spot in the Territory,” ran the patter in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Chief City of a New Empire of the Great Southwest, a 1908 brochure printed to feed the city’s emerging industries.

A person with incipient or active tuberculois cannot withstand the damp, foggy, penetrating weather... He needs clean air and dry air and an invigorating climate... to make a man feel like puffing out his chest and boasting of the goodness of being alive. He needs a climate where the very air will bring a spring to his step and an edge to his appetite... where the out-of-door life can be lived during the winter without a bundle of wraps; and where the summer can be taken in stride without the loss of energy because of oppressive heat... He needs, in few words, the Albuquerque climate. He needs, even more, the Albuquerque attitude, the Albuquerque spirit, the Albuquerque morale- a thing as definite when once you come in contact with it as the Sandia mountains and the flowing Rio Grande. - The Sanatorium Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 4 March 1928.

They came in droves. The Albuquerque population swelled with the ranks of the "lungers" (the slang, and pejorative, term for the infected), and although no specific records were kept on the number of tuberculous patients who arrived from the East, contemporary reports speak of them in “thousands” and “multitudes”. Sanatoriums, group homes for “consumptives”, sprang up along Central Avenue and on the East Mesa, in the canyons of Sandia, and high in the mountains.

“… the person with incipient consumption may be reasonably sure that he will not die of that disease as long as he remains in the atmosphere of Central New Mexico,” claimed the author of Albuquerque Illustrated(1892), a booklet published by the Commercial Club and designed to attract immigrants to the city. Sadly, this statement was little more than hyperbole. Because of the limits of medical knowledge at the time, there was little the sanatoriums could offer except an emphasis on rest, fresh air, and good food. Residents were encouraged to spend as much time in the outside air as possible, even in winter, in the belief that the clean, dry, high altitude atmosphere would purge their lungs of their ailment. However, there is no evidence to support the wild claims of climatology, and it is estimated that as many as 60% of Albuquerque's tuberculous arrivals died within their first few years.

Today, there seems to be little trace of the "Well Country". The miracle of antibiotics put an end to the migrations of health seekers, and few Southwestern cities are interested in reliving their history as destination points for the victims of a "plague" of any kind. But there is no doubt that the Albuquerque of today would not have existed without the impact of those who came west under doctors' orders. Over the next several weeks, this blog will examine tuberculosis in Albuquerque, the remnants of the city's once incredibly profitable sanatorium industry, and the lives of those who came to "chase the cure".