Dr. Croghan's Patients and the Huts That Remain

John Croghan bought Mammoth Cave in eighteen thirty-nine with a plan that had nothing to do with tourism. Croghan was a physician from Louisville, and he believed the cave's constant fifty-four-degree temperature, its extraordinary stillness, and its unusual atmosphere might cure tuberculosis. Consumption, as most people called it, was the leading cause of death in the United States. If the cave could arrest it, the cave would be worth more than any tourist attraction in the country.

In eighteen forty-two, Croghan moved fifteen tuberculosis patients underground. He had wooden huts constructed in a section of the cave several hundred feet from the entrance, where the temperature never changed and no weather reached. The patients lived in the cave for weeks, tended by enslaved people who brought food and fresh supplies down from the surface. Croghan monitored them carefully. He believed the cold and the stillness would slow the disease.

The results were unambiguous and catastrophic. The cave air, which Croghan had thought was unusually clean, was in fact saturated with moisture and possibly with particulates from fires used to heat and light the huts. The patients did not improve. They deteriorated. By the time Croghan ended the experiment, multiple patients had died. The others emerged weaker than when they had gone in. Croghan himself developed tuberculosis not long after, and died of it in eighteen forty-nine.

The wooden huts are still in the cave. They have stood in the fifty-four-degree dark for nearly two hundred years, and because the cave's atmosphere suppresses biological decay, they are intact, if fragile. Rangers point them out on tours as evidence of a genuine medical theory pursued with genuine commitment, which failed in the only way that mattered: completely, and for everyone who participated.