In the same San Gabriel foothills, others opened their doors, and their windows. Normand died in 1930, at age 36, with her secretary holding her hand. Fun fact: Pottenger’s most famous patient was the silent film comedienne Mabel Normand, reputedly the first movie actor to throw a pie in another actor’s face - that of Ben Turpin, whose face was already funny enough without custard. Pottenger retired in 1955, and in time his land fell to its California destiny: a housing development. TB patients lived, and died, on Pottenger’s 40 acres, under his treatment regimen of fresh air and repose. Remember that sanitariums weren’t modern hospitals where patients dropped in for a checkup or treatment. Francis Pottenger - whose first wife had died of TB - opened a model sanitarium. The geology that cursed Southern California with earthquakes also blessed it with restorative hot springs.īy the time Bangs died in 1905, the San Gabriel Valley was a destination for consumptives. She built a boarding house and cottages, and word of mouth brought recruits of the “busted-lung brigade” to Pasadena.Ĭalifornia From sacred to profane: A brief history of Southern California’s hot springs She brought her sickly daughter from the East and, in 1882, bought land on the eastern lip of the arroyo in Pasadena, the site of the present-day U.S. The first chapter, though, was the sanitarium industry.Īt first there were just doomed people pulling up stakes from cold and dank and crowded places to come here. would turn into Lourdes on the Pacific, populated by “lungers” (pronounced lung-ers, not lunge-rs). But when Southern Pacific Railroad - a full partner in populating this new Los Angeles - began running ads inviting passengers to “California - the Sanitarium of the World,” some of the PR men and politicians started worrying that L.A. The Chamber of Commerce dream demographic for new Angelenos was hale, white, middle- and yeoman-class Americans. They worked, all right - in extracting gold from the pockets of the desperate. Some were medically supervised villages for scores of residents, with schools, hobbies and social events.Īnd it wouldn’t be America had there not been the quacks, showmen with snake-oil nostrums at the ready: garlic derivatives, copper treatments, patent remedies like “Tuberculene” - active ingredient, creosote. Some advertised themselves as “resorts” offering healthful outdoor living: croquet, tennis, naps in hammocks, sunshine and wholesome food that made TB sound like a vacation. Some were legitimate hospitals, using best-known practices at the time to make the best of an incurable disease. Junipero Serra, founder of the California missions and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Over the centuries, TB did in the composer Frederic Chopin the enslaved man Dred Scott, subject of a notorious Supreme Court decision St. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, consumption, as it was also called, killed more Americans than any other contagious disease. Tuberculosis was called “the captain of the men of death” and “the white plague,” for how it left its victims pale and listless. Just think of all of the ballyhoo and bragging that Los Angeles’ 19th century promotional machine contrived: Come to Southern California! Come live in paradise! Perpetual sunshine, prosperity and health!Īnd come they did, by the tens of thousands, stepping off the westbound trains and into the salubrious California sunlight, all of them bringing their hopes, and some - a not-inconsiderable number - bringing something else: the tubercleĪnd soon, the boosters would learn that old, old lesson about being careful what you wish for: It might come true.
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