Prevention and Treatment for TB at Arequipa Sanatorium :: Tuberculosis Health Medical Essays

Prevention and Treatment for TB at Arequipa Sanatorium Arequipa Sanatorium and its â€Å"pottery† for tuberculosis treatment was founded in 1911 in the town of Fairfax, Marin County in the Northern Bay Area of California. [1] It was from the outset a private enterprise initiated by Dr. Philip King Brown. On October 22, 1913, a twenty-one year old housewife weighing 111 pounds, was admitted to Arequipa for â€Å"coughing on exertion.† When she was discharged home on February 28, 1914, she had worked at Arequipa Pottery over 105 hours, and had earned four dollars and five cents for it. She never gained more than three pounds and was probably discharged more for her lack of ability to work, than for being â€Å"cured.† A month earlier, the nurse Superintendent at Arequipa had written a letter to the Associated Charities of San Francisco, saying that â€Å"unless (the woman) is able to earn her way in the pottery, I doubt that we will be able to maintain her at the Sanitarium any longer.† [2] This young woman’s experience with sanatorium treatment at Arequipa, underscores a contradiction in the treatment of tuberculosis in the Progressive Era. Arequipa means â€Å"Place of Rest,† and while enforced rest was fundamental to Brown’s regimen, he also considered work to be therapeutic. Requiring work from patients helped â€Å"solve† the problem of how women of â€Å"modest means† could avoid destitution from their illness. It also helped Brown financially support his enterprise. The contradiction of using both rest and work as treatment at Arequipa provides a window into the complexity of health and social reform in the Progressive Era. In The Tuberculosis Movement, Michael Teller notes that in the mid 1800s the notion of the hereditary origin of TB â€Å"darkened every hope of prevention or cure.†[3] In her 1996 cultural history Fevered Lives, Katherine Ott, argues that the acceptance of TB after Koch’s discovery of the tubercule bacillus in 1882, transformed â€Å"consumption† into the specific and more clearly defined diagnosis of â€Å"tuberculosis.† In fact, sufferers and the public experienced these two conditions as two separate but related diseases.[4] Prevention and treatment of tuberculosis in the Progressive Era, included both older ideas of the disease as hereditary and the new understanding that the disease was infectious. Without effective medical treatment and without a modern understanding of the dormant and active phases of the disease, eugenic ideas about pre-disposition to TB coexisted with limited and mechanical ideas about infection control.