The City Built Upon Tuberculosis

United States. 1800s. Tuberculosis is plaguing the land, and people didn’t know how to deal with it. At this time, the disease, which primarily attacks the lungs, was incurable, as antibiotics were yet to be discovered.

The only treatment physicians could recommend was going to the mountains, where the dry and fresh air was believed to help draw out moisture from the lungs and alleviate sufferings. Tuberculosis patients flocked to arid climates looking for cures and, if not, at least a good death. The assumption was, that while the disease surely destroyed the body, the mind grew sharp and imagination more vivid. This notion grew from the fact that so many literary figures succumbed to the disease, including Samuel Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, and John Keats. So enticing the disease was that Lord Byron himself admitted, “I should like to die from consumption,” and novelist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, best known by her pen name George Sand, said of her lover, the composer Frédéric Chopin, that he “coughs with infinite grace.”

With this recommendation given by the physicians at that time, people went to dry regions across the United States, and the city that benefited the most from this sudden “tuberculosis rush” was a young city called “Colorado Springs”.

Colorado Springs was founded in 1871. Located on the High Plains just east of the Rocky Mountains, the city enjoys comfortably cool and dry winters, with hot and sunny summers, while falls are pleasant and dry. The city has abundant sunshine year-round, averaging more than 250 sunny days per year. It was the [perfect] location to heal.

Learn more about the city made famous by tuberculosis, and how patients were treated there, over at Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum/ Amusing Planet)