Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 29, 1992 TAG: 9203270228
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Under the leadership of a former Confederate sailor who lost four children to TB, the state's medical board was reorganized and given the mandate to develop a tuberculosis sanatorium to combat the deadly illness.
The board searched the state and finally settled on a rustic site in the Catawba Valley 16 miles from Roanoke and 11 miles from Salem. It once was the location of a bustling resort and health spa called Roanoke Red Sulphur Springs, where visitors came to the blue Allegheny Mountains to take the sulphur waters and escape the heat and malaria of the flatlands. A brochure in 1889 touted the medicinal powers of the springs: "No fogs or dampness - dyspepsia, hay fever, lung, heart, throat and female troubles relieved."
The first patient was admitted to Catawba Sanatorium on July 30, 1909. At that time, the sanatorium - the first in the state - consisted of the resort buildings and two pavilions and four tents for patients. It could accommodate 26 men and 16 women.
Even before the discovery of streptomycin in 1944 and other anti-bacterial drugs in the 1950s, sanatoria brought about the decline of TB, says Dr. Sam Dooley of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. They removed victims from their friends and family and thus helped to stop the spread of the contagious disease.
Catawba was the flagship of TB sanatoria in Virginia for six decades.
But with TB on the run, most of the facilities closed or were converted to other purposes. Catawba became a mental health hospital with an emphasis on elderly patients in 1972, and the two other state sanatoria at Charlottesville and Burkeville were phased out. Mount Regis, a private sanatorium in Salem, was turned into a treatment facility for alcoholism.
Now, with tuberculosis on the rise and grabbing headlines with a particularly vicious strain of the disease, there is talk that sanatoria may make a comeback.
The photos that Joanne Honeycutt salvaged from the trash can at Catawba Hospital harken back to 1913, a time when tuberculosis killed 3,000 to 4,000 Virginians a year. Honeycutt received her early nurse's training at the sanatorium and went on to become director of nursing for 27 years before she retired.
She's an unofficial archivist who has saved photos, brochures and publications that provide a history of the facility.
The happiest years of Honeycutt's career were spent nursing ailing tuberculosis patients back to health, she says.
When Catawba opened, tuberculosis was commonly called consumption - because it actually seemed to consume the body - and the "Great White Plague." A 1913 Virginia Health Bulletin branded it Virginia's worst disease and noted that it struck 20,000 victims a year. When not fatal, it could take years to cure.
A newspaper reporter who contracted tuberculosis and was sent to Catawba wrote about his experiences for the Roanoke Times in 1959.
"The doctor finished his study of the [X-ray] plates and turned to you," Clarence Whittaker wrote.
" `I want you to go away for a while,' he told you. The words struck like a hammer blow. When you recovered your voice you wanted to ask some questions but it was difficult to pose even one. You settled for this observation: Well, I guess that means Catawba."
The photographs Honeycutt saved predate Whittaker's stay by more than four decades, but the regimen and philosophy of treatment were pretty much the same - rest, good food, fresh air and hygiene.
The sanatoria movement began in the 1880s in America when Dr. Edward Trudeau contracted the disease and traveled to his beloved Adirondack Mountains to spend his last days in a place he had enjoyed as a youth, boating, fishing and camping. He was astonished to find himself recovering in the clean air.
Trudeau became a proponent of rest, fresh air and nutritious food in the treatment of TB, and the first sanatorium opened in American in 1883, according to a history by Dr. Lula Woods Garst, a long-time doctor at Catawba who died in 1974.
Before Trudeau's discoveries, TB patients were confined to hot, airless rooms. His revolutionary notions took hold, and the older methods of treatment quickly became obsolete.
Gunslinger Doc Holliday would not have entered legend had not the disease taken him to the fresh air of the American West. And German novelist Thomas Mann used the sanatorium as a microcosm for the world at large in "The Magic Mountain."
In Honeycutt's photos, patients line up for weigh day, a monthly occurrence to monitor the patients' progress. "They would be so happy if they gained a pound," Honeycutt says.
They made baskets and lamps and other crafts in the sanatorium's basket weaving shop. They lay in beds, lined up in a neat row on the porch. Ear phones were on each patient's head, plugged into radios in their rooms. Patients stayed outside day and night.
Bundling up in blankets became a necessary ritual. Sometimes, snow drifted to the foot of the beds while patients burrowed into the bed clothes, Honeycutt says.
A list of rules in 1930 included this: "All patients must remain in the open air except during meals, when performing their necessary toilet and from supper to bedtime. Fresh air is one of the main factors in the treatment of tuberculosis. One cannot get too much of it, and night air is as beneficial as day air."
Rest was of primary importance as well. Victims of the disease generally were run down with symptoms that included fever, rapid pulse, weight loss, loss of appetite, night sweats and coughing. Tuberculosis can attack a variety of areas in the body, but the lungs are the most common target. Allowing the body to heal itself naturally - and taking any burden possible off the lungs - was a principle of the sanatoria movement. In many cases, lungs were collapsed to rest the organ, a practice that continued into the 1940s.
Patients with advanced cases of the disease would rise at 7:15, finish breakfast by 8:30, return to bed until lunch, go back to bed, eat dinner and be back in bed for lights-out by 9:30 p.m. Sudden movements were discouraged. Exercise was gradually worked into the regimen. Along with rest, nutritious food was mandatory; and Catawba operated its own dairy farm to supply patients with fresh milk.
Hygiene was essential as well to prevent the spread of the disease, which often was passed along through germs discharged by coughing or sneezing.
Patients "expectorating on grounds, into fireplaces, basins or closets" were subject to dismissal.
They were also required to be clean shaven, and "flirtations" were forbidden.
Anti-bacterial drugs were developed as a treatment for tuberculosis, and they made it non-infectious early in the treatment. The sanatoria movement was in its sunset years. But before it shifted to a mental health facility, Catawba treated 25,000 patients and graduated about 250 nurses from its program. On Jan. 1, 1972, Catawba ceased to admit TB patients.
A 1984 program for Catawba's 75th anniversary noted its role in the battle against TB:
"The drop in mortality in Virginia from 200 per 100,000 in 1900 to three per 100,000 in 1970 is, along with the eradication of smallpox and polio, one of the spectacular success stories in medical history, of which Catawba Sanatorium was an integral part."
by CNB