The Consumptives: Chasing the Cure
Near Manitou Springs, Colorado
In the late eighteen hundreds, the deadliest disease in America was tuberculosis, a wasting lung illness they called consumption. There was no cure, and doctors offered the one thing they thought might help, a change of climate. Dry air, sunshine, rest, and mountain elevation were prescribed as therapy, and the towns at the foot of Pikes Peak advertised themselves as the world's best medicine.
The sick came by the trainload, so many that they had a name for it, chasing the cure. Manitou Springs sold not just its air but its water. The Shoshone Spring was taken for its laxative effects, and the springs in general were promoted for healing.
Health seekers filled the hotels and boarding houses, and sanatoriums rose to hold them. The regimen was rest in the open air, day and night, even in winter, combined with what they frankly called disciplined gluttony, patients eating twice their normal food and sometimes gaining fifty pounds. Some got better.
Many did not. The dying came here hoping the mountains would save them, and the town was built partly on their hope and their money. Tuberculosis was the region's first great economic engine.
The era finally ended in the nineteen forties, when antibiotics arrived and made the climate cure obsolete, closing the sanatoriums for good.
