Tuberculosis in Albuquerque Part 2

Life in the Fever

None but the initiated know
the wealth of the lunger’s woes,
or the piquancy of his joys
or speak the lunger’s tongue
-Unknown, Killgloom Gazette, 1914

Tuberculosis. A bygone disease that scarred a bygone city, transformed it from booming railroad and mining town to a home for the sick, a place for the ill to arrive and do nothing more strenuous then breathe, rest, and then either get well or die.


Many devices were marketed
for the treatment of tuberculosis.
More than a few were of questionable efficacy.

But, who were they? Anyone who spends too long looking at the lives of the gone eventually asks that question. Who were the people who came here out of hope for a cure, but who must have lived in constant fear of their own likely deaths? Who traveled thousands of miles into a strange desert landscape far from friends and family and the world they knew, who spent all day and all night out-of-doors in the hope that the air itself, though too hot in summer and too frigid in winter, would miraculously send their terminal disease into retreat? Who coughed blood and kept their sputum in boxes for fear of infecting others, who turned to miracle drugs and experimental electrical treatments and snake oil and quackery and peculiar bicycle pump “inhalation apparatuses”? Gone now, of course, irrevocably gone, the mark of their presence fading into time, the old sanatoria now grown outward into hospitals or collapsed inward to forgotten remnant buildings, the convalescent cottages with their open air back porches renovated beyond recognition in the streets of downtown neighborhoods. The patients, of course, mostly dead, row upon row of them in the City’s old cemeteries. I wake up to breath the same air that they so desperately wanted to save them (maybe a bit dirtier now, but still the same dryness that they fetishized, and cleaner than most cities of this size), and I want to know them.


TB patients carried small boxes and jars to spit in
called "sputum boxes" or "pocket spittoons". A small
industry sprang up around their manufacture.

It’s not easy. Remnants of buildings do a poor job in communicating people, and endless accounts of the “war on tuberculosis” focus on institutions and methodology, social trends and class disparities, rather than cold nights and lungs filling with blood, the loneliness of dying in a strange desert. There are documents from the time, but they are mainly in the form of advertisements for the sanatoria or the City itself, endlessly extolling high recovery rates in ridiculously qualified hyperbole:

[T]hose who seek this climate while the disease is yet in its earlier stages are invariably benefited, and nearly always permanently cured… 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. The disease is unknown among the natives of this section, and they have no name for it in their dialect¹.

Page after page of such material glosses over the single most prominent facts in a “lunger’s” life: death, disease and discrimination. When mentioned at all, the high death rate is ascribed to “physicians of the east [who] keep tuberculars who can pay until the cases are hopeless, and then send them west to die.”² The disease itself is only discussed in the many exhortations to seek fresh air and to spit only into small boxes which should be burned afterward. In fact, a ubiquitously published set of guidelines for living with tuberculosis admonishes patients to avoid discussing their disease at all, “and allow no one to talk of theirs to you. Remember the saying, ‘I have troubles of my own; go tell yours to the policeman.’”³ In the age before antibiotics, denial was a palliative.

And the discrimination? Like so much discrimination, it is barely noted in any official publication, and we must turn to the memories of one Mela Koeber, a Spanish resident of the North Valley, long after the fact to get a taste of it:

When I was a little girl I remember that everybody was scared to death of the people who came out here with tuberculosis. I was warned absolutely not to play with children who came from TB families. At school we were given instructions about avoiding people who walked down the sidewalk and carried little cartons to spit into…

One of the warnings my mother gave me was to be sure that any house I went into didn’t have a back porch with awnings because that’s where the tuberculars slept out… One of my best friends when I was in second or third grade was a beautiful little girl and her parents were from Chicago. One day my friend, Grace, called me on the phone and asked if my mother would let me go with her and her daddy and mother uptown for a Coke… Her father was dressed like an easterner. He was wearing a little derby hat… He was very pale for a man- I mean, he looked ill… when we got back they insisted I come into their home. I went in. She showed me their house and where her father slept in an enclosed porch that had been added with just a cot. It had awnings which were lowered when it was very cold. That was the cure- to sleep out winter and summer.

When I got home, I didn’t dare tell my mother that I had gone into their house. It was really terrible. I never told her, I never told anybody because I was afraid for years that I’d caught TB… everybody was afraid of catching tuberculosis, and since we already lived here in a land that was supposed to cure it, if we got it- where could we go⁴?

Her account is heartbreaking, both for the story of the local people living in fear of their transformed city, and the image of the pale father and his lonely little girl. I want to know more about his experience in the moment he was living it, what it was like for him and others like him, but I find nothing. Even accounts from survivors are brief and superficial, a mere mention of the disease as something overcome.


The TB patient is a public menace
in this not-very-funny comic strip.
click for a larger image

In the Albuquerque Library’s Special Collections branch, I find something different. It’s a newsletter, of sorts, but hardly the slick, illustration heavy pamphlets of a sanatorium’s official publication. Calling it a “publication” is a misnomer, actually; it is nothing more than faded typewriting across thin paper, a few corrections made in pen over smudged lettering. “THE KILLGLOOM GAZETTE” it reads in blurry capital letters at the top of the page, “Published by the able minded lungers of the Methodist Sanatorium. Jan. 1914.” Clearly, I think as I flip through the roughly bound collection, this is something different.

It is. As stated on its opening page, the ‘Gazette was written by patients at one of Albuquerque’s sanataroria, and because it was written by those who suffered it offers a unique glimpse into their attitudes. The emphasis on the positive inherent in the name “Killgloom” is not rare among the documents from the time, but in the pages of the ‘Gazette it did not mean shying away from the grim realities of their condition. The opposite was true, in fact, and the writers painted themselves as madmen who saw the encroach of death and mocked it. Page after page of the ‘Gazette is taken up with poems referencing inevitable trips to “Fairview on the Hill” (one of Albuquerque’s largest cemeteries at the time), and losing battles against the “cough”:

Hear that lunger with the cough,
Hacking cough-
From the world of busybodies’ taken off:
He was inclined to scoff
At the little hacking cough;
Told the doc that he would bet him
That the cough would never get him,
But he found that he was off-
That he couldn’t bluff the T.B.s or the cough
Hacking cough, cough, cough, cough
Cough, cough, cough,
And they got him- did the T.B.S and the cough⁵

The Gazette's "artistic supplement",
depicting the shack where it was published.


In many issues, the unstable condition of the writers was a source of humor:

THE GAZETTE’S TEMP.
It is said that everything in New Mexico is affected by one or more of three things- the climate, the altitude, or the freight rates. This is not true however; the KILGLOOM GAZETTE is affected only by temperature. And that doesn't mean the weather, either. it means the clinical temperature of the editorial staff.

It has been suggested that the staff submit to Nurse Corbin a schedule something like the following-

Temperature normal- We get out a paper of 8 pages.
“ 98.8- We get out a paper of 6 pages
“99.0 - 4
99.2- 2
99.4 - 1
over 99.5 - We don’t get out any paper.

If the anarchic braggadocio found in their pages is to be believed, the antics of those with little to lose often caused them to butt heads with local authorities:

The importation of a quantity of Annheuser-Busch Malt Nutrino by one of our conspicuous residents has aroused the activity of City Clerk Silent Jim Gates and the (illegible) in general and it is highly probable that unless said resident, mentioning no names, can prove an alibi, legal action will be taken against him. What for? Just because the down-with-the-liquor-traffic organizations are suffering from ennui.

OF COURSE the stuff is medicine.

It is hard to say if the picture these jovial "lungers" painted is to be taken as typical, but there is an undeniable humanity in the pages of the Gazette. For the first time, I feel as though I have an inkling of what life must have been like in the "sans": the boredom, the need to turn away from the despair, the enormous amount of time one must have had while waiting for "the cure", and the need to fill it with something other than brooding. I can see this, I can picture myself there.

In only a few months, the inspired amateurism of the Killgloom Gazette had been usurped by its own success. The ‘Gazette transformed into The Herald of the Well Country, a far more typical and prosaic affair. Articles written by doctors and representatives of the various sanatoriums edged out the macabre musings of worsening patients (several of whom left the newsletter due to their illnesses), and within two years the Herald was indistinguishable from a dozen other sanatorium newsletters.

Next: Remnants.

Methodist Sanatorium, which the writers of
the Killgloom Gazette called home.

Footnotes:

1. Albuquerque Illustrated, 1892
2. Sanatorium Quarterly, March 1928
3. The Herald of the Well Country, 1916
4. Shining River, Precious Land: An Oral History of Albuquerque's North Valley Sargeant and Davis
5. Killgloom Gazette, Jan-March 1914 (and all following quotes)