There's a new book out about Gary Trudeau's great-grandfather's tuberculosis sanatarium in the Adirondacks, Portrait of Healing: Curing in the Woods. From the review in the New York Times it sounds as if Dr. Trudeau's sanitariam was a blissful haven of happiness:

Accounts of Dr. Trudeau's nurses and patients, teased from diaries and interviews with survivors, are gathered in a large photo-filled book, "Portrait of Healing: Curing in the Woods" (North Country Books, 2002), by Dr. Victoria E. Rinehart, a nurse in Burlington, Vt. Unlike some of the other accounts dwelling on the suffering of the patients, this book, with a foreword by Garry Trudeau, the creator of "Doonesbury" and great-grandson of the founder, paints a remarkably happy picture of the sanitarium.

"I looked for some negatives and couldn't find them," Dr. Rinehart said. The oldest patient she interviewed, she said, was 95 and had been there as a patient and then as a nurse supervisor. "Obviously when one looks backward, the memory could be distorted," Dr. Rinehart said. "But I couldn't find anyone alive today that didn't have anything but glowing things to say."

The review points out that historians are skeptical. Back in the days before antibiotics, tuberculosis patients went through all manner of horrible "cures." They had their lungs collapsed intentionally, sometimes just by puncturing the chest wall, sometimes by adding foreign material to the chest cavity to keep them collapsed. (I remember once reading about a case in which lucite balls were packed in the chest.) But most of the time, they went to these santariums for the "rest cure," where they lived by strict rules until their tuberculosis either killed them or went into its natural dormancy stage.