The Tuberculosis Migration
Near Albuquerque, New Mexico
The railroad brought passengers to Albuquerque for one reason above all others: their lungs.
From roughly eighteen eighty to nineteen forty, Albuquerque was one of the premier destinations for tuberculosis patients in the United States. Before antibiotics, which did not exist until the nineteen forties, the only widely accepted treatment for tuberculosis was to move to a place with dry air, high altitude, and abundant sunshine. Albuquerque, at five thousand three hundred feet, bone dry, and sunny three hundred days a year, fit the prescription. The city's promoters leaned into it. They called Albuquerque the Heart of the Well Country. The Santa Fe Railway ran pamphlets that might as well have been prescriptions.
The patients who came were called health-seekers, or more bluntly, lungers. Some arrived with money and checked into the sanatoriums that proliferated across the city. Others arrived broke and camped on the edges of town. Some recovered. Many did not. The ones who recovered sometimes stayed, and because tuberculosis in the early twentieth century struck across class and profession, the survivors included artists, scientists, physicians, and entrepreneurs who built institutions.
William Lovelace arrived in the area as a tuberculosis patient around nineteen oh six. He stayed, and in nineteen thirteen he founded the Lovelace clinic that became the Lovelace Health System. Decades later, his nephew, also a doctor, used the clinic to run the physicals for the first American astronauts. The aviator Katherine Stinson Otero came to New Mexico for her health, recovering at a sanatorium in Santa Fe rather than Albuquerque, and became a civic figure in that city. Dorothy McKibben came, stayed, and became the indispensable Santa Fe gatekeeper for the Manhattan Project, the woman who controlled access to Los Alamos without appearing on any classified list.
Tuberculosis stopped being a death sentence in the late nineteen forties, when streptomycin proved effective. Albuquerque's sanatorium economy dissolved. The institutions the lungers built remain.
