Catawba Sanatorium and the War Against Tuberculosis
Near Roanoke, Virginia
Fourteen miles northwest of Roanoke, in a narrow valley where Catawba Creek runs between two ridges of the Blue Ridge, the state of Virginia opened a tuberculosis sanatorium in nineteen oh nine. The Catawba Sanatorium was built on the prevailing medical theory of the time: that high elevation, clean mountain air, and enforced rest could arrest the progression of tuberculosis, which was the leading infectious cause of death in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The theory was not entirely wrong.
In the era before effective antibiotics, fresh air and rest did sometimes slow the disease, though they rarely cured it. Catawba became one of the largest tuberculosis treatment facilities in Virginia over the following decades. At its peak it housed several hundred patients at a time, drawn from across the state.
A small settlement grew up around it: staff housing, a farm that supplied the facility, a chapel, a school for children who were patients. For many of those who went to Catawba, the stay lasted months or years. For some, it lasted the rest of their lives.
The sanatorium operated as a segregated facility in the manner of all Virginia public institutions of the era. Black tuberculosis patients were sent instead to a separate state sanatorium at Burkeville, part of the separate and unequal public health system of the Jim Crow decades. The discovery of streptomycin in nineteen forty-three and the development of effective multi-drug tuberculosis therapy through the nineteen fifties transformed the picture.
Catawba transitioned into a general psychiatric facility and later into other uses as tuberculosis mortality collapsed.
