The Clean Air and Sunshine Cure
By the late 19th century, Colorado and the American Southwest had become famous for the health benefits of a dry, sunny climate. At that time, the only known treatment for tuberculosis (TB) was clean air and sunshine and hundreds of people with tuberculosis descended upon Denver in hopes of finding a miracle cure for what was then the nation’s leading cause of death. Consequently, many TB sufferers spent their last dollars coming to Colorado. By the 1890s, it was estimated that one out of every three residents of the state was there for respiratory reasons. However, no facilities existed to provide treatment or shelter to these victims. In Denver, victims of TB were literally dying in the streets as boarding houses often banned "lungers," as they were called.
Read more about this topic: National Jewish Health
Famous quotes containing the words clean, air, sunshine and/or cure:
“Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“More beautiful and soft than any moth
With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path
Through dusk, the air liner with shut-off engines
Glides over suburbs”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
“The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)