Dr. Emily Abel
Although notorious for its polluted air today, Los Angeles once billed itself as a health resort, especially for people with “lung troubles.” Soon after the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1876, publicists launched a massive crusade to portray the metropolis as the promised land and circulated countless stories of miraculous cures. Because the inflated booster rhetoric promised more than could possibly be delivered, the city soon contained an unusually large proportion of sick and dying people. Tuberculosis (or consumption, as it often was called) was especially prevalent. After Robert Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus, Americans began to understand that TB was communicable.
Image of the St. Vincent Sanatorium in Los Angeles, 1880s. From the collections at The Huntington Library.
Thus, after wooing health seekers from the east, the metropolis adopted a policy of exclusion. The first targeted group included white, single men labeled “tramps” during the 1890s and early 1900s. When a bill to establish a statewide quarantine failed, state authorities sponsored a federal bill to discourage low-income people with tuberculosis from leaving the East and dispatched posters to train stations throughout the country, warning that California provided no free care to residents of other states. Health officials then turned their attention to Mexicans, who arrived in large numbers in the 1920s. Nativists sought not just to restrict their entry but also to expel them in the 1930s. State and local health officials were major players in the deportation and repatriation drives, which reduced the size of the Mexican community in Los Angeles by a third. Health officials then turned their attention to Filipinos, again urging those with tuberculosis to depart and providing transportation home. A far more extensive campaign focused on the thousands of people who poured into Los Angeles from other parts of the nation in the Great Depression. Health authorities participated enthusiastically in efforts to seal the city’s borders.
Image of the Barlow Sanatorium in Elysian Park in 1915. The hospital was founded in 1902 to treat tuberculosis patients in Los Angeles. From the collections at USC Libraries.
The first attempt to establish a public sanatorium in Los Angeles met defeat largely as a result of fears that it would attract impoverished health seekers. By the early twentieth century, the need could no longer be denied. The major institution serving poor people was the county hospital, which was greatly overcrowded. Soon after the passage of a state law providing a $3-a-week subsidy to counties for every indigent tuberculosis patient in an approved facility, the county began construction of Olive View Sanatorium in the northern part of the San Fernando Valley.
Image of Olive View Sanitarium, 1920s. From the collections at The Huntington Library.
The first ninety-five patients arrived in 1920. One wrote to a public health official “to tell of the wonderful treatment we are receiving here…we all realize that while the Doctor is a martinet, he has the best interest of every patient at heart.” The facility soon expanded. By 1931, it accommodated 917 patients. Located far from the city, Olive View was able to segregate patients from the rest of the population. But because street car service did not extend that far, families had difficulty visiting.
Emily Abel is Professor Emerita, UCLA-Fielding School of Public Health. She is the author of two books on tuberculosis and Southern California: Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles (Rutgers University Press, 2007) and Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative (Rutgers University Press, 2006).
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