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At the White Haven tuberculosis sanatorium in Pennsylvania, treatment consisted of one large meal daily plus all the milk and raw eggs one could eat and plenty of fresh air, no matter what the weather. On the day this photograph was taken in 1904, it was 16 degrees below zero.
told Madonna he didn't think she would live three more months. Frail, dying, twenty-two-year-old Madonna determined that if she was to die, she would die at home. Then she plotted her escape. With the help of a nurse she had become friendly with and her fellow patients, Madonna sneaked out of the Sioux San alive.
Madonna's parents, determined to save their daughter, went to the office of the governor of South Dakota in person to request that she be allowed into the "white" sanatorium. So it was that after six years of the Sioux San, Madonna was admitted to a different hospital with better food and the best treatments available. First her lung was collapsed, in hopes of suffocating the germs. Then all her ribs on one side were removed: since she could hardly breathe, the bugs would get less oxygen. Once drugs that could kill tuberculosis were discovered, such treatments as these were abandoned - and as we look back, it is hard to imagine that they did any good - but at the time, with no other alternatives, doctors would try just about anything. Somehow, becaus of or despite these treatments, Madonna recovered.
As prisonlike as the Pines might have been for Betty MacDonald, as painful as Madonna Swan found her treatments, these two were considered among the luck ones: they got into sanatoriums. Around the world, when sanatorium care was all the rage, there were not nearly enough sanatoriums for patients. In 1905 there were three times as many people on the waiting list at a Philadelphia sanatorium as there were beds. In India, by 1935, there was room in sanatoriums for only six thousand of the country's two and a half million patients. Even worse, it was not clear that sanatorium treatment, the only kind available, was doing any good. Some better treatment was clearly needed, and soon.
BRILLIANT BLUE RODS
The first step to finding a treatment was to discover what caused the disease. That was no easy task. The slow-growing tuberculosis bug hid from scientists very well for so long because Mycobacterium tuberculosis has many tricks up its sleeve. First of all, it infects many different parts of the body. No one would suspect that a person with a swollen festering neck, one with a bloody cough, and one with a crooked spine were all suffering from the same disease. Even after a few brilliant doctors - Laennec was one - saw through this ploy and began to suspect the germ was the same in all these cases, they still had to find it.
To make things even more difficult, some of the best minds in science were convinced that tuberculosis was not caused by a germ at all. Because it took years for infected people to show signs of illness, it was hard to connect the disease to exposure to a germ. A quick-moving disease such as plague or smallpox makes it