Ingham County Tuberculosis Sanatorium

Description:

A small collection of photographs from a scrapbook that was kept while the donor's husband was a resident/patient of the Ingham County Tuberculosis Sanatorium (later Ingham Chest Hospital, then McLaren Hospital), 1947 to 1950. A letter from the donor (with identifiable information redacted): "Recently I came across the enclosed small photos of what used to be called the Ingham County Tuberculosis Sanatorium, the building now vastly changed and currently called McLaren Hospital. My husband....spent four years there with TB from 1947 to 1950. Four years is kind of inconceivable in today's world, but in the '40s, what we called the "wonder drugs" were just being developed and beginning to be used. I'm not sure where the patient's booklet is that [husband] was given when he entered the hospital, having been diagnosed when he entered then Michigan State College on the GI Bill. At that time the Health Department required a skin test for TB, an airborne disease, for admission or employment at schools, camps, universities, etc. If a person has had TB, the blood test will continue to show positive for their lifetime. [Husband]'s diagnosis must have come from a subsequent chest X-ray. TB diagnosis meant an individual wasn't really given a choice about hospitalization. The main treatment at the time was bed rest, giving the body a chance to heal itself, or not. New patients lay flat on their backs, having to slowly earn privileges like being allowed to raise their heads, then to sit up, etc. After two years, [husband] was told his disease was "arrested," there being no cure as yet. He spent two months with his brother, but then a sputum test came back positive. On his his return to the hospital, he said Dr. Stringer expressed surprise that as a GI he'd not been given streptomycin. They started him on it, but it didn't seem to help. So he agreed to surgery which removed the lower lobe of his left lung where the infection was. All told, he spent 4 years in the hospital, another year at home recuperating before he was able to return to MSC to continue his education. In the early years of our marriage, living in the barracks apartments at now MSU, he reported back to the hospital monthly for sputum checks to make sure the disease did not recur. It did so for many of the people who shared his hospital experience, and a great many died of TB. As incidence of TB began to drop, [husband] told me that he learned that to keep the beds filled, the now-named Ingham Chest Hospital began taking in patients from Skid Row in Detroit. Eventually, it became a general hospital.... The photos, which were stored all together in a couple of envelopes, would have been taken in the years between 1947 and 1950. Several show the building, some of the construction that must have happened in those years. Some are of patients, some of staff, some of entertainment provided by probably some staff and some outside groups. Most of these came from an album, old enough that the glue (probably rubber cement) had dried and the individual photos were floating loose....Of course, none were labeled..." The photographer or photographers are also not identified. Due to identifiable patient information protected under HIPAA regulations, a portion of these photographs are restricted from access. Those that are not restricted have been digitized and are linked to this record. Contact the library for more information.

Date Created:

[1947 TO 1950]

Data Provider:

Capital Area District Library (Lansing, MI). Forest Parke Library and Archives

Collection:

Ingham County Tuberculosis Sanatorium

Subject Topic:

Lansing (Mich.), Ingham County (Mich.), Tuberculosis, Hospitals, Convalescent hospitals, and Nurses

Language:

English

Rights:

Copyright Not Evaluated

URL:

http://cadl.pastperfectonline.com/archive/413DAE80-4422-42D0-8150-701112220202