Muirdale Sanatorium: Wisconsin's Monument to the White Plague
Near Milwaukee, Wisconsin
In the early twentieth century, tuberculosis was the single leading cause of death in the United States, killing roughly one in seven Americans and earning the name the White Plague for the pallor it left on its victims. By nineteen thirteen, Milwaukee County officials recognized that their existing facilities for tuberculosis patients were completely inadequate, and they authorized six hundred thousand dollars for a new institution on a twelve hundred-acre tract of county land just west of Wauwatosa.
The resulting Muirdale Tuberculosis Sanatorium, named for Wisconsin naturalist John Muir, broke with prevailing architectural thinking about how to treat the disease. Most tuberculosis institutions of the era used low cottages that kept patients spread out and exposed to fresh air, which was then believed to be the primary treatment. Muirdale's designers, working in consultation with the Wisconsin Anti-Tuberculosis Association, chose instead a central three-story hospital and administration building, a departure that proved so effective it became the model for tuberculosis facilities across the country.
The first patients arrived in November of nineteen fifteen, transferred from other county facilities. By nineteen twenty-three, Muirdale had a capacity of three hundred fifty patients. In later years, as both the disease toll and treatment methods evolved, that number grew to over six hundred, including a children's ward called the Preventorium, dedicated to treating young children at risk of infection.
The discovery of streptomycin in nineteen forty-three and its adoption through the late nineteen forties transformed tuberculosis from a death sentence into a treatable infection. Muirdale's patient population declined through the nineteen fifties and sixties. By the nineteen seventies it had been repurposed as Rehab West, a care facility for elderly patients with mental illnesses. It closed permanently in nineteen seventy-eight. The Wisconsin Historical Society added it to the National Register of Historic Places in twenty eighteen, preserving in bureaucratic language the memory of a disease that once shaped the geography and architecture of American cities.
