Thousands of people flocked to New Mexico from 1880 through 1940 seeking a cure for tuberculosis, the leading cause of death in America. These lungers, as they were called, included artists such as Will Schuster and Carlos Vierra, who “came to heal and stayed to paint.” Bronson Cutting, brought to Santa Fe on a stretcher in 1910, became the publisher of the Santa Fe New Mexican and a powerful U.S. senator. Others included William R. Lovelace and Edgar T. Lassetter, founders of the Lovelace Clinic, as well as Senator Clinton P. Anderson, poet Alice Corbin Henderson, architect John Gaw Meem, aviator Katherine Stinson, and Dorothy McKibbin, gatekeeper for the Manhattan Project—to name just a few.
By 1920, health seekers comprised an estimated ten per cent of New Mexico’s population. Although the tubercule bacillus had been isolated in 1882, the development of streptomycin and other effective drugs would not occur until the 1940s. During the intervening decades, the medically approved regimen consisted of nutritious food, fresh air, and rest, preferably in a high, dry, and sunny place. New Mexico, with its high elevation, abundant sunshine, and dry climate was considered ideal. The New Mexico Bureau of Immigration, established in 1880, wasted no time in advertising the territory’s healing climate as a way to promote New Mexico during its long struggle for statehood. New Mexico: The Tourists Shrine, published in 1882, claimed that:
The lowest death rate from tubercular disease in America is in New Mexico. The census of 1860 and 1870 gives 25% [of all deaths] in New England . . . and 3% in New Mexico. The whole Territory has always been astonishingly free from epidemic disease.
As further proof of New Mexico’s healthful environment, the Bureau’s 1889 Winter Edition claimed that “diseases among children are singularly infrequent and the doctor would starve to death who made a specialty waiting on the little folks.”
In 1882, German scientist Robert Koch discovered Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis, which changed the perception of the disease and its treatment. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, sanatoriums were established to care for as well as to isolate those afflicted with tuberculosis, a disease now considered contagious. New Mexico’s old military forts—especially Fort Stanton in Lincoln County and Fort Bayard near Silver City—were viewed as possible sites. Nothing definite would happen, however, until the end of the Spanish American War in 1898. By this time, explained Lois G. Seibel:
A considerable number of tuberculosis patients had accumulated at the U.S. soldiers home in Washington DC. No special treatment had been undertaken for their care and there was thought to be a substantial danger of infection for the other inmates. The climate in Washington was not considered to be advantageous in the treatment of tuberculosis.
It soon became apparent that separate facilities in a more salubrious climate were needed to treat military personnel suffering from this disease.
To meet this need, two facilities were established in 1899—the U.S. Marine Hospital Sanatorium at Fort Stanton and the U.S. Army General Hospital for tubercular soldiers at Fort Bayard. These two institutions helped legitimate New Mexico’s claims as a health resort. In his 1908 Report to the Secretary of the Interior, Governor George Curry wrote:
The splendid successes in the treatment of tuberculosis being achieved by the government army sanatorium at Fort Bayard, in Grant County, and by the Marine-Hospital Service Sanatorium, at Fort Stanton, in Lincoln County, furnish constant and convincing proof of the right of New Mexico to the title of ‘the nation’s sanatorium’ and to the wonderful effect of the climate in checking the white plague.
But when the U.S. Congress proposed establishing a leper colony in one of New Mexico abandoned military posts, the territorial legislature objected vehemently. The result was Joint Resolution 8, dated, February 24, 1905, which stated that:
We as representatives of the people of the Territory of New Mexico, object, protest against and deprecate such action on the part of the Senate of the United States and ask the members of the house of representatives where the bill is now pending to oppose it and defeat it for we consider it an insult that our fair and healthy commonwealth should be chosen by congress as the abiding place for such unfortunates. . .
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