For A 1900’s Tuberculosis Patient, El Paso Was The Best Place To Be

Forget the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins; El Paso was the place to be in the early 1900's as tuberculosis ravaged Texas and the entire country.

Tuberculosis, (aka "TB"), is a serious, life threatening disease that affects the lungs and is transmitted by sneezing, coughing or even singing. It can spread quickly in crowds.

It's treatable and, thanks to medical advances over the last century or so, not too big of a deal if caught in time and treated properly. In those cases, the odds of recovery are over 80%. That still leaves about a 20% mortality rate though so, TB is still no joke.

In The 1900's, El Paso Offered The Best Treatment For TB.

In the early 1900's though, doctors were still trying to figure it out and El Paso was loaded with one of the few, successful treatments they knew of at the time. Sunshine.

El Paso's hot, dry climate was ... literally ... just what the doctor ordered for those suffering from tuberculosis, aka "consumption" in the 1900's and those patients flocked here from across the USA and around the world.

As a result, El Paso had a bunch of sanitoriums built to accommodate the sick. Hotel Dieu was one, along with Southwestern General Hospital and the Hendricks - Laws Sanitorium, (now a seminary in central El Paso), were among El Paso's sanitoriums.

The Mt. Franklin Country Club was transformed into another, the Southern Baptist Sanitorium, whose ruins still stand today. This one, along with many others, is long gone ...

Mt. Franklin Country Club Was One Of The First TB Sanitoriums In El Paso.

The former Mt. Franklin Country Club is said to have been the first of many sanitoriums built as the sun city became a hub for patients. Sadly, most still died of the disease until doctors finally began to turn the tide in the 1940's.

Filled with folks suffering and slowly wasting away, it's no wonder that former sanitoriums like Southwestern General Hospital are some of the most haunted sites around.