Why TB cases declined when they did

Most medical professionals will say the discovery of streptomycin as a cure accounts for the reduced incidence of the disease in the early 1960s. As a result of this decline, the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitorium closed in 1974.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, writer Matt Ridley poses an interesting question: Did urban renewal policies of the postwar period reduce the incidence of TB before the antibiotic streptomycin was discovered? The discovery of a cure was a significant breakthrough, of course, but the isolation of patients and the removal of slums may have played an equally important role in reducing the number of cases. As obsolete as the idea of a santorium seems today, it successfully controlled the spread of TB.

In his comments on this subject, Ridley refers to Experiment Eleven by Peter Pringle. I’m looking forward to reading this new book, which isn’t yet released. It tells the little-remembered history of the discovery of streptomycin. Albert Schatz was a young graduate student who made the discovery and then was was robbed of both the credit and monetary rewards of his discovery. Ultimately he was robbed of the Nobel Prize.

A Job in the Microbiology Lab

A guest post by Susan Cachel

During the summer of 1968, I was employed in the Microbiology Lab at the Municipal TB Sanitarium. Dr. Robert Thompson {editor’s note: Governor James Thompson’s father}, the head of the lab and a very refined gentleman, hired me.

Because my family lived at Carmen and Kostner, it was easy to walk to work past Gompers Park, or take the Foster bus to Pulaski, and walk to the main entrance of the MTS. My job was to scan slides of sputum samples of patients who either had, or were suspected of having, TB. These samples were sent in from public health facilities all over Chicago.

The TB bacteria were unmistakable.  They were rod-like and stained a brilliant magenta color, and were sometimes so numerous that they really overwhelmed the slide.  I’m sorry to say that I would get very excited when I got a slide with TB bacteria on it, and I would yell “I got one!  I got one!”

Because I never had any exposure to TB, I was forbidden to go into the Pathology Lab, or have any contact with patients. In fact, I only glimpsed the patients at a distance.  However, I did attend an autopsy one morning that was conducted on a patient by Dr. Thompson.  I viewed the proceedings from a mezzanine gallery.

One of the perks of the job was that I got a free lunch every day at the cafeteria. The MTS had its own cooks and serving staff.  Because it was thought that good nourishing food was essential to combat TB, we were fed wonderful three course meals with desert. During lunch break, I could wander through the grounds, except that I had to avoid patient lodgings.

The MTS was a self-contained city, because patients originally were never allowed to leave the facility. Family and friends could visit patients at arranged times. The MTS had a school, a beautiful cinema/theatre, and spectacular forests, gardens, rock gardens, and koi pools. There was an elaborate underground tunnel system that connected most of the buildings. If it were raining, people could travel from place to place underground. There was an annual art fair that took place every August, that patients and staff could enter.

Snowy Day, April 1938

On a rare snow-laden April day–the city’s snowiest April on record– Dr. William J. Ford photographed the grounds of the Muncipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium …

… and he took a photo of the same spot on a summer day. Dr. Ford was a 1933 graduate of Northwestern Medical School, and went on to do his internship at Cook County Hospital.

Dr. Ford wasn’t, however, visiting the MTS as a practicing physician. After contracting tuberculosis from infected patients, he spent time recuperating at MTS and later at an Arizona sanitarium, where he also worked as a physician. He later returned to Chicago and completed his internal medicine residency at County. He entered private practice with an office on Broadway and worked for the VA.

Dr. Ford passed away in 1972 from an illness unrelated to TB. His son, Dr. Brian Ford, also a physician, has generously given me permission to share his father’s photographs. I’ll be posting more in the future.

I’m not 100 percent sure which building this was, but I’m guessing it was the Administration Building of the Infirmary Group. On the plan of the drives and walkways shown below, it is the horizontal bar that forms the letter H along with the Men’s and Women’s Infirmary buildings. That would be the power plant in the background, and we would be looking east.  The pergola on the left-hand edge no longer exists on the site.

The walkway with pillars supporting planters is, of course, stunning. It was designed by   O. C. Simonds & Company, credited on the plan for the landscape work as well as for construction of the driveways and walkways. The plan is dated August 27, 1913.

O. C. Simonds, along with Jens Jensen, founded the Prairie School of landscape design, and Simonds was the first landscape architect to use native plants. He  designed or contributed to the design of Chicago’s most notable landscapes, including Lincoln Park, Graceland Cemetery, University of Chicago and Morton Arboretum.

Credits: Prairie in the City: Naturalism in Chicago’s Parks, 1870-1940, Chicago Historical Society (1991).  Blueprint, Bentley Historic Library, item BL00215

Bird’s Eye View, 1919

This photograph appeared in the City of Chicago 1919 annual report and is currently stored at the University of Illinois. I believe the horizontal building on the right was the Administrative Building-Infirmary Group, and the building running perpendicular to it on the left was the Women’s Infirmary.  Together with an unseen wing housing the men’s infirmary to right of the Adminstrative Building of the Infirmary, the Infirmary complex formed the letter “H.”  At the time the Sanitarium opened, the Infirmary had 300 beds.

According to the 1915 plan, the Administrative Building of the Infirmary housed the senior physician’s office, examining room, nose and throat room, laboratory, nurse’s room, medical records room, orthopedic room, operating room (actually five separate rooms), routine laboratory, x-ray room, head nurses room, and drug and supply room. Each Infirmary had 125 beds and five nurses’ offices.

I’m wondering if readers who were familiar with the building in later years can tell me if the same services remained in these buildings.

The photograph was shot from approximately 5800 North (Ardmore) facing west towards present-day Pulaski Road. (On the layout illustration, Crawford Rd [now Pulaski] is shown at the bottom.) The women’s cottages can be seen on the far left side of the photograph. The taller building in the distance, in what is the far southwest corner of the site, was the Nurse’s Building. It was positioned closest to the entrance gate at Bryn Mawr and Pulaski, then Crawford, to give the nurses “the necessary privacy and quietude.”

Sources: The photograph of the Sanitarium is stored at the online digital collection of the University of Illinois. The illustration of the layout appears in  The Municipal Control of Tuberculosis in Chicago, page 21, 1915.

Dr. William M. Lees

Marilyn Reinish is the daughter of Dr. William M. Lees, who was Chief of Surgery at “the San” from about 1949 until its closing in 1974. Here she recalls some memories from her childhood experiences of the MTS:

My memories include Christmas Mass every year where Wanda Klos RN sang the most beautiful Ave Maria I had ever heard.  Of course being Jewish limited my exposure, but Wanda had a beautiful, beautiful voice!  I recently heard about Wanda through a friend, but was not able to reach her. Wanda worked along side my Father for all his time at ‘the San.”

Once I was in a car with several others, driving through the beautiful grounds of MTS and I remember Wanda seating me on several coats and trying to hold me up in the car so I would look bigger and older and the Security Guard would not question me. I was not 16 and none of us wanted  to have problems with Security.

One year, my Dad arranged for me to follow the Head of Lab around to gather data and material for a Science project. The project took First Place in the State Competition, thanks to all the help I received.  I remember a pair of “dried” lungs on a stand that my Father brought home from MTS and placed in our dining room. The lungs had lots of black spots all over them. Our family lecture that night was on the effect of smoking on lungs. That lecture and data quoted was years before the Surgeon General’s report on the hazards of smoking.

Years later, a friend of mine in college told my Father that he also grew up a few houses away from the San. He said he would always see people throwing paper bags  over the fence on the grounds and he wondered what the bags contained. My Father asked if he ever checked it out.”Of course,” said my friend, “It was a bottle of liquor.”  My Dad burst out laughing and acknowledged that was often an issue.

I had copies at one point of an article my Father wrote about his  concerns of a resurgence of TB and how Public Health would handle the problem.

My father died in 1981 and did not live to see so many of his concerns and predictions come to fruition.  He was so dedicated to his work, his patients and to his work family at MTS.  The staff seemed to care so much.  It is comforting to remember the good parts!

(Editor’s note: Governor Thompson’s father was head of the MTS lab and worked there many years.)