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Collecting New Mexico Tuberculosis, Health-Seekers, and Sanatorium-Era Books: The Literature of the Lunger Migration and the Climate Cure

How Tuberculosis Patients Transformed New Mexico's Anglo Population, Built Its Hospitals, and Reshaped Its Politics

By Josh Eldred · New Mexico Literacy Project · · ~8,500 words

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

Between the arrival of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in the early 1880s and the introduction of streptomycin in the mid-1940s, New Mexico experienced one of the most extraordinary demographic transformations in American history. Thousands of tuberculosis patients — called "lungers" in the blunt vernacular of the era — boarded Pullman sleepers in Chicago, Kansas City, and St. Louis and rode west to the high desert, chasing a cure that no physician could guarantee but that the territory's promotional machinery advertised with evangelical fervor. They came because they were dying and because the medical consensus of the time held that dry air, altitude, and sunshine could arrest the disease that was killing one in four Americans. Many died in New Mexico anyway. But many recovered, and those who did stayed to build lives, enter politics, establish businesses, found hospitals, and reshape the civic and cultural fabric of the state. The books that document this migration — from scholarly monographs on public health policy to institutional histories of sanatoriums that became the state's largest healthcare systems — constitute one of the most important and under-collected categories in New Mexico bibliography. This is the collector's guide to that literature.

The White Plague and the Climate Cure: Historical Context

TB & Health Seekers books, including Chasing the Cure in New Mexico: Tuberculosis and the Quest for Health (2016), are sought-after. Tuberculosis — the "white plague," the "captain of all these men of death," consumption — was the leading cause of death in the United States through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. The disease killed roughly 150,000 Americans per year through the 1900s and 1910s. Before Robert Koch identified the tubercle bacillus in 1882, the disease was poorly understood; after Koch's discovery, the bacteriological mechanism was clear but effective treatment remained elusive for another six decades. The period between Koch's identification and the introduction of streptomycin (1944) and the truly effective multi-drug regimens of the 1950s represents one of the most painful chapters in medical history: physicians understood the disease but could not cure it.

Into this therapeutic vacuum stepped the climate cure. The idea that certain climates — dry, warm, high-altitude — could arrest or reverse tuberculosis had roots in classical medicine, but it achieved its greatest influence in America during the 1880s-1920s. Physicians across the eastern establishment recommended that TB patients travel to the arid Southwest, to Colorado, to Arizona, and above all to New Mexico, whose combination of altitude (Albuquerque sits at nearly 5,000 feet, Santa Fe at 7,000 feet), dryness (Albuquerque averages fewer than nine inches of annual rainfall), and sunshine (over 300 days per year) seemed to embody the climatotherapeutic ideal. The medical literature of the period is filled with case reports of patients who improved dramatically upon relocating to New Mexico, and while the open-air, high-altitude approach did have genuine therapeutic value — rest, nutrition, clean air, and sun exposure supported immune function — the cure rates advertised in promotional literature far exceeded clinical reality.

Nancy Owen Lewis and the Definitive Modern Text

Nancy Owen Lewis's Chasing the Cure in New Mexico: Tuberculosis and the Quest for Health (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2016) is the book that every collector, historian, and student of this topic needs first. Lewis, a scholar affiliated with the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, spent years in New Mexico archives — the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, the Albuquerque Museum, the Center for Southwest Research at UNM, institutional records of Presbyterian Healthcare Services and other sanatorium successors — assembling the most comprehensive account of the lunger migration yet published.

Lewis's achievement is threefold. First, she documents the full geographic scope of the health-seeker phenomenon across New Mexico — not just Albuquerque, which dominates most popular accounts, but Silver City, Las Vegas, Santa Fe, Fort Stanton, Roswell, and smaller communities that received TB patients. Second, she reconstructs the institutional history of the sanatoriums themselves, tracing how facilities founded to treat tuberculosis evolved into the modern hospital systems that serve New Mexico today. Third, she embeds the New Mexico story within the broader national narrative of tuberculosis treatment, showing how the state's experience reflected and diverged from patterns in Colorado Springs, Tucson, Saranac Lake, and other health-seeker destinations.

The 2016 Museum of New Mexico Press first edition — a handsome hardcover with period photographs and maps — is the collector target. Museum of New Mexico Press is a quality institutional publisher whose titles hold value within the NM collecting community. Signed copies, particularly those inscribed at SAR events or at the New Mexico History Museum, carry meaningful premium. This is a book that is still in print and readily available, making it accessible for scholars and readers; the collector's interest lies in first-edition hardcovers, signed copies, and copies with relevant association.

Jake W. Spidle Jr.: The Medical History of New Mexico

Jake W. Spidle Jr.'s Doctors of Medicine in New Mexico: A History of Health and Medical Practice, 1886-1986 (University of New Mexico Press, 1986) is the comprehensive medical history that provides the institutional and professional framework for understanding the sanatorium era. Spidle, a historian at the University of New Mexico, traced the development of medical practice in New Mexico from the territorial period through the centennial of the state medical society. The tuberculosis chapters are substantial, documenting the arrival of physician-lungers who came to New Mexico for their own health and then established practices treating fellow health-seekers — a self-reinforcing cycle that built the medical profession in the state.

Spidle's work is essential for understanding how the sanatorium system operated from the physicians' perspective: the diagnostic practices, the treatment regimens (rest, fresh air, graduated exercise, diet), the institutional politics of denominational and secular sanatoriums competing for patients, and the medical debates over whether the climate cure had genuine therapeutic value or was an expensive placebo sustained by booster propaganda. The 1986 UNM Press first edition is a solid academic hardcover that trades in the upper-two-figure to low-three-figure range depending on condition.

Spidle followed with The Lovelace Medical Center: Pioneer in American Health Care (UNM Press, 1987), an institutional history tracing the evolution of the Lovelace medical enterprise from its origins in the sanatorium era. The Lovelace name in Albuquerque healthcare traces to Dr. William Randolph Lovelace, who arrived in New Mexico in the 1910s and built a medical practice that grew into the Lovelace Clinic and eventually the Lovelace Medical Center. The Lovelace connection to aerospace medicine — Dr. William Randolph Lovelace II directed the medical testing of the Mercury astronauts — adds a dimension that extends the Lovelace institutional story well beyond its sanatorium-era origins. The 1987 UNM Press first edition is the companion collector target to the Doctors of Medicine volume; together, the two Spidle books provide the most detailed institutional documentation of NM medical history available.

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Sheila Rothman and the Social Experience of Tuberculosis

Sheila M. Rothman's Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (Basic Books, 1994) is not a New Mexico book per se, but it is essential to any serious collection on the health-seeker phenomenon because it provides the national social-history framework within which the NM migration occurred. Rothman, a historian at Columbia University, used personal letters, diaries, and medical records to reconstruct the lived experience of tuberculosis patients in nineteenth and early twentieth-century America — the diagnosis, the decision to travel west, the experience of sanatorium life, the family separations, the financial strain, and the constant negotiation between hope and despair that defined the TB patient's existence.

Rothman's treatment of the health-seeker migration is particularly valuable because she draws on primary sources — letters home from patients in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona — that convey the emotional and psychological dimensions of climate migration in ways that institutional histories cannot. The 1994 Basic Books first edition in hardcover with dust jacket is the collector target. This is a title that has been widely cited in subsequent TB scholarship and has established itself as a landmark in American social history of medicine. The Johns Hopkins University Press paperback reprint serves as a working reference but lacks collector premium.

Emily Abel and the Politics of TB Exclusion

Emily K. Abel's Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles (Rutgers University Press, 2007) provides a critical counterpoint to the New Mexico health-seeker narrative. While New Mexico actively recruited TB patients through its Bureau of Immigration and booster machinery, Los Angeles increasingly attempted to exclude them. Abel documents how the initial welcome that western cities extended to health-seekers gave way to hostility as the economic and social costs of caring for indigent TB patients became apparent. Sick migrants who exhausted their savings, who could not work, who required charitable care, and who died in boarding houses became a public burden that strained municipal resources and provoked backlash.

Abel's work is directly relevant to the New Mexico collector because the dynamics she describes in Los Angeles played out, with variations, in Albuquerque and other NM communities. The tension between the economic benefits of health-seeker tourism (patients and their families spent money) and the social costs of caring for the sick and dying was a persistent theme in NM civic life through the sanatorium era. The 2007 Rutgers University Press first edition is the collector target — a well-produced academic hardcover from a prestige university press.

Albuquerque: "The Well Country" and Lunger City

No New Mexico city was more profoundly shaped by the tuberculosis migration than Albuquerque. By the early twentieth century, the city had acquired the nickname "Lunger City" — a designation its boosters loathed but that captured a demographic reality. At the peak of the health-seeker influx, TB patients and their families constituted a substantial share of Albuquerque's Anglo population. The sanatoriums — large institutional facilities, small private operations, tent cities, and boarding houses catering to health-seekers — were concentrated along and near East Central Avenue, the main east-west commercial corridor that would later become Route 66.

St. Joseph Sanatorium, established by the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati in 1902, was the Catholic anchor of Albuquerque's sanatorium system. Located on Grand Avenue (now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue), St. Joseph grew into one of the largest TB treatment facilities in the Southwest. The Sisters of Charity brought institutional resources, nursing expertise, and a commitment to serving indigent patients alongside paying ones that made St. Joseph a critical safety-net institution. The sanatorium evolved over decades into a general hospital, and its institutional lineage connects to what became Lovelace Hospital — a transformation documented in Spidle's Lovelace Medical Center history.

Presbyterian Sanatorium, founded in 1908 by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), was the Protestant counterpart to St. Joseph. Originally located at East Central Avenue and Oak Street, the Presbyterian facility began as a small tent-and-cottage operation treating TB patients and grew steadily through the 1910s and 1920s as denominational funding and patient volume expanded. Like St. Joseph, Presbyterian transitioned from a TB-focused sanatorium to a general hospital as tuberculosis treatment shifted from climate therapy to antibiotic regimens. Presbyterian Hospital became the nucleus of Presbyterian Healthcare Services, which is today the largest healthcare system in New Mexico — a multi-billion-dollar enterprise whose origins trace directly to a small tuberculosis sanatorium on East Central Avenue. The institutional continuity from 1908 tent colony to twenty-first-century healthcare corporation is one of the most remarkable institutional trajectories in NM history.

The Methodist Deaconess Sanatorium (also known as the Methodist Sanatorium) served the Methodist denominational community. Murphey Sanatorium, operated by Dr. William R. Murphey, was one of the more prominent private facilities. Beyond the named institutions, dozens of smaller operations — some medically supervised, others barely more than boarding houses that catered to health-seekers — proliferated through the neighborhoods east of downtown Albuquerque. Tent cities, where patients lived in canvas tents with wooden floors and screened sides to maximize exposure to fresh air, dotted the mesa east of the city. The tent-city phenomenon reflected both the medical orthodoxy of open-air treatment and the economic reality that many health-seekers arrived with limited means.

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The Architecture of Healing: Sleeping Porches, Sun Galleries, and the Open-Air Cure

The sanatorium era produced a distinctive architectural vocabulary rooted in the medical theory that fresh air, sunlight, and ventilation were therapeutic. Sanatorium design prioritized features that would have been considered impractical or bizarre in conventional residential architecture: sleeping porches where patients slept outdoors year-round, including through New Mexico's cold winter nights; sun galleries and solaria designed to maximize ultraviolet exposure; open-air wards with walls that could be entirely opened to the elements; and orientation plans that positioned patient rooms for optimal sun and air circulation.

The sleeping porch became the signature architectural element of the sanatorium era and left a lasting mark on Albuquerque's residential building stock. Houses built during the 1910s-1930s in the neighborhoods near the sanatoriums frequently incorporated sleeping porches — screened, roofed outdoor rooms typically positioned on the south or east side of the house — that allowed residents (many of them current or former TB patients) to sleep in the open air. These sleeping porches survive on hundreds of houses in Albuquerque's older neighborhoods, a built-environment record of the lunger era that is documented in the architecture and historic-preservation literature. The connection between sanatorium architecture and the broader Pueblo Revival and Territorial Revival building traditions of the period is explored in the Pueblo Revival architecture pillar.

The architectural history of New Mexico's sanatoriums is scattered across institutional publications, historic-preservation surveys, and the broader NM architecture literature rather than concentrated in a single definitive volume. The New Mexico Historic Preservation Division's surveys of Albuquerque's older neighborhoods document surviving sanatorium-era buildings and sleeping-porch residences. Van Dorn Hooker's Only in New Mexico: An Architectural History of the University of New Mexico (UNM Press, 2000) touches on the university's relationship to the sanatorium-era city that grew up around it. The intersection of medical architecture and regional building traditions remains an under-researched topic with significant potential for future scholarship.

Beyond Albuquerque: Silver City, Las Vegas, Fort Stanton, and the Statewide Network

Silver City, at approximately 5,900 feet in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico, was a significant health-seeker destination that drew TB patients attracted by its elevation, dry climate, and mountain air. The Cottage Sanatorium was the most prominent facility, but Silver City's health-seeker infrastructure extended to smaller sanatoriums, boarding houses, and private residences that accommodated consumptives. Silver City's TB connection predates the railroad era — the town's remoteness limited the health-seeker influx until the AT&SF's Silver City branch line improved access. The town's most famous historical figure, Billy the Kid, has no TB connection, but collectors of NM health-seeker material should be aware that Silver City's institutional and local-history publications occasionally contain sanatorium-era documentation. The Billy the Kid bibliography covers Silver City's broader literary scene.

Las Vegas, New Mexico — the territorial-era commercial center 65 miles east of Santa Fe — developed a health-resort identity partly around the Montezuma Hot Springs and the grand Montezuma Hotel, a Fred Harvey Company property that the AT&SF railway built to attract tourists and health-seekers to the hot springs. The Montezuma Hotel, an elaborate resort structure that burned and was rebuilt multiple times, embodied the overlap between health tourism and leisure tourism that characterized the era. While the Montezuma's clientele was broader than TB patients, the hot-springs health-resort concept drew on the same therapeutic assumptions about climate and water cures that drove the sanatorium industry. The Montezuma complex later became Armand Hammer United World College of the American West — a transformation documented in Las Vegas NM's local-history literature.

Fort Stanton, in Lincoln County in the Sacramento Mountains region of south-central New Mexico, represents the federal government's investment in tuberculosis treatment. Established as a military post in 1855 and originally garrisoned to control the Mescalero Apache, Fort Stanton was decommissioned as a military installation and converted to a U.S. Public Health Service Marine Hospital in 1899. The facility treated merchant sailors and other federal employees suffering from tuberculosis, taking advantage of the site's 6,200-foot elevation and dry mountain climate. Fort Stanton operated as a federal TB hospital for over half a century, eventually transitioning to other uses as antibiotic therapy made climate-based treatment obsolete. During World War II, a section of the facility was used as an internment camp for German merchant sailors. Fort Stanton's TB history is documented in Spidle's Doctors of Medicine, in Owen Lewis's Chasing the Cure, and in institutional histories of the U.S. Public Health Service. Fort Stanton is now a state historic site listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Santa Fe, despite its higher elevation (approximately 7,000 feet) and even drier climate, was less dominated by the sanatorium industry than Albuquerque, partly because the city's cultural establishment — the artists, writers, anthropologists, and archaeologists who constituted Santa Fe's Anglo elite — actively resisted the "lunger city" image. Santa Fe received health-seekers, and several of its most prominent citizens (including Senator Bronson Cutting) arrived as TB patients, but the city never developed the concentrated sanatorium infrastructure that defined Albuquerque's East Central corridor. This distinction between Albuquerque the medical city and Santa Fe the cultural city — both initially populated by Anglo health-seekers but developing in different directions — is one of the more interesting themes in NM urban history.

The Notable Lungers: Politicians, Editors, and Civic Leaders

The most remarkable aspect of the TB migration to New Mexico is not the aggregate demographic shift but the individual trajectories of health-seekers who recovered and rose to positions of extraordinary civic and political influence. The state's political history in the first half of the twentieth century cannot be understood without acknowledging that several of its most powerful figures arrived as dying men and stayed to govern.

Bronson Murray Cutting (1888-1935) came from one of the wealthiest families on Long Island — his family's social world was that of Gilded Age New York high society. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, Cutting arrived in Santa Fe in 1910 at age twenty-two. He recovered, purchased the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper, and used it as a platform to build a progressive Republican political career that placed him in the U.S. Senate in 1927. Cutting served until his death in a 1935 plane crash near Atlanta, at age forty-six. He was a champion of veterans' rights, a supporter of New Mexico's Hispano communities, and a figure of sufficient national stature that his death was mourned well beyond the state. Cutting's political papers are held at the Library of Congress. Richard Lowitt's Bronson M. Cutting: Progressive Politician (UNM Press, 1992) is the principal biography — a UNM Press first edition that is itself a collector target within the NM political-biography canon.

Clinton Presba Anderson (1895-1975) arrived in Albuquerque from South Dakota in 1917, severely ill with tuberculosis. He recovered in the New Mexico climate and built a career in journalism and insurance before entering politics. Anderson served in the U.S. House of Representatives, was appointed Secretary of Agriculture by President Truman in 1945, and then served as U.S. Senator from New Mexico from 1949 to 1973 — one of the longest Senate tenures in the state's history. As Senator, Anderson was instrumental in the creation of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and in federal natural-resources policy. Anderson's autobiography, Outsider in the Senate (World Publishing, 1970), co-written with Milton Viorst, documents his TB experience and his subsequent political career. The NM environmental and water-rights literature — covered in the water rights and environmental pillar — intersects directly with Anderson's legislative legacy.

Clyde Tingley (1881-1960) came to Albuquerque from Ohio around 1911, seeking relief from respiratory illness. He recovered, entered local politics, served as Albuquerque city commissioner and then mayor, and was elected Governor of New Mexico in 1934, serving from 1935 to 1939. Tingley was a New Deal Democrat who used federal relief programs aggressively to build infrastructure across the state during the Depression. Tingley Beach, the park along the Rio Grande in Albuquerque, bears his name. Tingley's career illustrates the pattern of the recovered lunger who channeled post-recovery energy into civic engagement with an intensity that contemporaries sometimes attributed to the gratitude and urgency of a person who had faced death.

Lew Wallace (1827-1905) occupies a different position in this narrative. Wallace was not a tuberculosis patient but was appointed Governor of New Mexico Territory in 1878 by President Hayes, partly in the aftermath of the Lincoln County War. Wallace famously wrote portions of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (Harper & Brothers, 1880) while serving as governor in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. His presence in NM was political rather than medical, but his experience of the territory's climate and landscape contributed to the broader Anglo-American fascination with New Mexico that the health-seeker promotional machinery exploited. Wallace's collecting significance is documented at /lew-wallace-ben-hur-palace-of-governors-collecting.

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Charles F. Lummis and the Southwest Promotional Tradition

Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859-1928) was not a tuberculosis patient, but his career as a journalist, editor, and Southwestern booster intersects with the health-seeker narrative at multiple points. Lummis's famous 1884-1885 walk from Cincinnati to Los Angeles — a 3,507-mile trek he undertook for publicity and health — made him a national figure. After suffering a stroke in 1888, Lummis convalesced at Isleta Pueblo, south of Albuquerque, from 1888 to 1892, living among the Tiwa-speaking Pueblo people and absorbing the ethnographic material that fueled his writing and advocacy career.

Lummis's The Land of Poco Tiempo (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1893) was among the most influential Anglo-American portrayals of New Mexico — a book that romanticized the territory's landscape, people, and climate in language that contributed directly to the promotional imagery exploited by the Bureau of Immigration and the AT&SF Railway. Lummis as editor of Out West magazine (formerly The Land of Sunshine) from 1894 to 1909 was arguably the most influential Anglo voice promoting the Southwest during the peak years of the health-seeker migration. His work sits at the intersection of health-seeker promotion, tourism boosterism, and genuine (if patronizing) cultural advocacy for Southwestern indigenous and Hispano communities. The Mary Austin pillar treats Lummis's broader literary significance.

The Bureau of Immigration and Booster Literature: Sunshine as Salvation

The New Mexico Bureau of Immigration, established by the territorial legislature in 1880, was the institutional engine of the health-seeker promotional campaign. The Bureau's mandate was to attract settlers and investment to New Mexico, and it quickly discovered that the territory's most marketable asset to eastern audiences was its climate. The Bureau produced pamphlets, booklets, and advertisements distributed through railroad stations, physicians' offices, and direct mail that advertised New Mexico as a land where sunshine cured disease, where the air was so dry that wooden buildings did not rot, and where consumptives could expect dramatic improvement if not outright cure.

This promotional literature represents one of the most collectible categories in the TB/health-seeker field. Bureau of Immigration pamphlets from the 1880s and 1890s — typically thin publications with titles emphasizing health, sunshine, climate, and opportunity — are genuinely scarce survivors. The Bureau's promotional campaigns predated modern advertising regulation, and the health claims made in these materials were extravagant by any standard: testimonials from recovered patients, statistics on cure rates that were not clinically verified, and language that positioned New Mexico's climate as virtually guaranteed therapy. Original Bureau of Immigration publications surface through Western Americana dealers (Heritage Auctions, William Reese Company, Dorothy Sloan auctions) and through estate sales of long-held NM ephemera collections.

Beyond the Bureau, individual physicians, sanatorium operators, chambers of commerce, and railroad companies contributed to the sunshine-and-health literary genre. Dr. W.R. Tipton of Las Vegas published promotional medical literature arguing for the therapeutic properties of the NM climate. The AT&SF Railway cooperated with the Bureau of Immigration in distributing climate-cure literature through its eastern offices and at stations along the line — the railroad had a direct commercial interest in filling its westbound trains with paying health-seekers. This overlap between medical promotion, government boosterism, and railroad commerce produced a body of ephemeral literature that documents the intersection of public health, capitalism, and territorial development in ways that few other historical sources can match. The territorial and statehood pillar covers the broader political context of the Bureau of Immigration's work.

The Railroad Connection: How the Rails Brought the Lungers West

The tuberculosis migration to New Mexico was made physically possible by the railroad. Before the AT&SF's arrival in the early 1880s, reaching New Mexico from the eastern population centers required weeks of overland travel by stagecoach or wagon — an impossibility for seriously ill patients. The railroad compressed the journey from weeks to days: by the 1890s, a Pullman sleeper could deliver a patient from Chicago to Albuquerque in approximately thirty-six hours. This accessibility transformed the health-seeker trade from a trickle of wealthy invalids who could afford extended overland travel into a mass migration that included middle-class and even working-class patients.

The AT&SF had a direct commercial interest in the health-seeker trade. TB patients and their families purchased tickets, occupied hotels, and consumed goods and services in the communities along the line. The railroad cooperated with the Bureau of Immigration and with individual sanatoriums in promoting New Mexico as a health destination. Fred Harvey's hotels along the AT&SF line accommodated health-seekers in transit, and the railroad's advertising department produced materials that featured New Mexico's climate alongside its scenery and cultural attractions. The railroad connection is documented in the NM railroad history pillar, which covers David F. Myrick's comprehensive survey, the Fred Harvey system, and the broader AT&SF literature.

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The Demographic Transformation: How TB Changed New Mexico's Anglo Population

The cumulative impact of six decades of health-seeker migration (1880s-1940s) on New Mexico's population was extraordinary. Before the lunger influx, New Mexico's population was overwhelmingly Hispano and Native American, with a small Anglo presence concentrated in military posts, mining camps, and commercial centers along the Santa Fe Trail. The territory was culturally and linguistically distinct from the Anglo-dominated territories and states to the north and east, and its political leadership reflected this demographic reality.

The TB migration brought thousands of Anglo-Americans — disproportionately middle-class, educated, and professionally trained — into the state. Physicians came for their own health and stayed to practice medicine. Lawyers, journalists, teachers, and business people arrived as patients and, upon recovering, established professional practices. By some scholarly estimates, as many as one-quarter of Albuquerque's Anglo residents in the early twentieth century had originally come to the city for TB treatment. This influx was not distributed evenly across the population: the health-seekers were predominantly Anglo, predominantly Protestant (though the Catholic sanatoriums served Catholic patients), and predominantly from the Midwest and East. Their arrival accelerated the Anglicization of New Mexico's political, economic, and cultural life.

The political impact was particularly striking. The health-seeker population provided New Mexico with an Anglo professional class that the territory had previously lacked in significant numbers. When New Mexico achieved statehood in 1912, the political infrastructure that made self-governance feasible included numerous recovered health-seekers who had built careers in journalism, law, medicine, and business. The territorial-to-statehood transition documented in the territorial and statehood pillar cannot be fully understood without accounting for the health-seeker contribution to the Anglo civic establishment.

The End of the Sanatorium Era: Antibiotics and the Transformation of Treatment

The sanatorium era ended not with a gradual decline but with a medical revolution. The introduction of streptomycin in 1944 — the first antibiotic effective against Mycobacterium tuberculosis — began the transformation of TB from a disease requiring months or years of climate-based institutional care to one that could be treated with drugs on an outpatient basis. The subsequent development of para-aminosalicylic acid (PAS) and isoniazid in the late 1940s and early 1950s created combination drug regimens that could cure tuberculosis reliably and relatively quickly.

The impact on New Mexico's sanatorium infrastructure was dramatic. Facilities that had been built, funded, and staffed to provide long-term residential care for TB patients found their primary purpose obsolete within a decade. Some closed. Others — most notably Presbyterian Sanatorium and the institutions that became Lovelace — transitioned to general hospital operations, leveraging their physical plants, medical staffs, and institutional reputations to serve the broader healthcare needs of a rapidly growing postwar Albuquerque. This institutional transition — from TB sanatorium to modern hospital — is one of the most important stories in NM healthcare history and is documented across the Spidle, Owen Lewis, and institutional-history literatures.

The end of the sanatorium era also ended the health-seeker migration. After the 1950s, TB patients no longer needed to relocate to the Southwest; they could be treated with antibiotics wherever they lived. New Mexico continued to grow rapidly in the postwar period, but the growth was driven by military installations, nuclear weapons research, the aerospace industry, and retirement migration rather than by the health-seeker trade. The state's identity shifted from "well country" to "Land of Enchantment" — a rebranding that acknowledged the obsolescence of the climate-cure narrative while retaining the romantic appeal of the Southwestern landscape and culture.

Supporting Bibliography and Companion Texts

Beyond the core five texts (Owen Lewis, Spidle x2, Rothman, Abel), the TB/health-seeker collecting field extends into several complementary areas:

Mark Caldwell, The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption 1862-1954 (Atheneum, 1988) provides a national narrative of the American anti-tuberculosis campaign from the Civil War through the antibiotic era. Caldwell's treatment of the institutional, political, and social dimensions of the TB fight provides context for the NM-specific literature.

Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Harvard University Press, 1996) examines how tuberculosis shaped and was shaped by American cultural attitudes — the romanticization of the consumptive, the stigma of contagion, the aesthetics of wasting illness. Ott's cultural-history approach complements Rothman's social history and Abel's political analysis.

Richard Lowitt, Bronson M. Cutting: Progressive Politician (UNM Press, 1992) is the standard Cutting biography, essential for understanding the most politically significant health-seeker in NM history. The UNM Press first edition is the collector target.

Clinton P. Anderson with Milton Viorst, Outsider in the Senate (World Publishing, 1970) is Anderson's own account of his career, including his arrival in New Mexico as a TB patient and his subsequent political rise. The 1970 World Publishing first edition is a solid political-biography collector target.

Erna Fergusson, Albuquerque (Merle Armitage Editions, 1947) — Fergusson's portrait of her hometown includes substantial discussion of the health-seeker era and the sanatorium city that shaped mid-century Albuquerque. Fergusson's broader collecting significance is documented at /erna-fergusson-dancing-gods-collecting.

Marc Simmons, Albuquerque: A Narrative History (UNM Press, 1982) devotes substantial attention to the sanatorium era and the health-seeker demographic within his comprehensive city history. Simmons was one of the most prolific popular historians of New Mexico in the late twentieth century, and his Albuquerque history remains a standard reference.

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Ephemera, Photographs, and Institutional Publications

The TB/health-seeker collecting field extends well beyond published books into ephemera and institutional materials that document the sanatorium era at the ground level. Bureau of Immigration pamphlets — the promotional literature that advertised New Mexico's climate cure — are the highest-tier ephemera targets, particularly publications from the 1880s and 1890s when the promotional campaign was at its most aggressive and the print runs were smallest. Sanatorium promotional materials — brochures, postcards, admission guides, and annual reports from St. Joseph, Presbyterian, Methodist Deaconess, Murphey, Cottage Sanatorium in Silver City, and smaller facilities — document institutional operations and patient-recruitment practices.

Photographs of sanatoriums, tent cities, sleeping porches, and health-seeker communities are significant visual-culture artifacts. Period photographs of Albuquerque's East Central Avenue sanatorium corridor, of tent cities on the mesa east of the city, and of individual sanatorium buildings document a built environment that has largely been demolished or converted to other uses. The Albuquerque Museum Photo Archives, the Center for Southwest Research at UNM, and the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives in Santa Fe hold significant collections of sanatorium-era photographs.

Medical literature and case reports published by NM physicians during the sanatorium era — in medical journals, in proceedings of the New Mexico Medical Society, and in monographs — document the clinical practice of tuberculosis treatment in the Southwest. These medical publications are scarce and surface infrequently through medical-history dealers and Western Americana auctions.

Points of Issue for Key Editions

Owen Lewis, Chasing the Cure in New Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2016). First edition identification: 2016 copyright date, Museum of New Mexico Press imprint, hardcover with illustrated dust jacket featuring period sanatorium photograph. No subsequent revised editions as of this writing. The Museum of New Mexico Press typically indicates first printings on the copyright page. Signed copies surface primarily through Santa Fe bookshop events, School for Advanced Research programs, and New Mexico History Museum events.

Spidle, Doctors of Medicine in New Mexico (UNM Press, 1986). First edition: 1986 copyright, UNM Press imprint, hardcover. Standard UNM Press first-edition identification applies: copyright page notation, absence of subsequent printing statements. This is a centennial publication of the New Mexico Medical Society, and copies occasionally bear bookplate or presentation markings from medical-society distribution.

Spidle, The Lovelace Medical Center (UNM Press, 1987). First edition: 1987 copyright, UNM Press imprint, hardcover. Companion volume to Doctors of Medicine, issued the following year. Institutional-history copies sometimes bear Lovelace Medical Center bookplates or presentation inscriptions from corporate distribution.

Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death (Basic Books, 1994). First edition: 1994 copyright, Basic Books (a division of HarperCollins) imprint, hardcover with dust jacket. Standard HarperCollins first-edition identification: number line on copyright page with "1" present indicating first printing. The Johns Hopkins University Press paperback reprint (1995) is the working-reference edition but lacks collector premium. The Basic Books first hardcover is the collector target.

Abel, Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion (Rutgers University Press, 2007). First edition: 2007 copyright, Rutgers University Press imprint. Available in both hardcover and paperback simultaneously (standard university-press dual publication). The hardcover first is the collector target. Rutgers typically uses copyright-page notation for first-edition identification.

Three-Tier Collector Market

Tier 1 (upper collectible prices and above): Original New Mexico Bureau of Immigration health-promotion pamphlets (1880s-1900s) — genuinely scarce territorial ephemera with institutional and demographic significance; Nancy Owen Lewis Chasing the Cure Museum of New Mexico Press 2016 first hardcover signed by Lewis with relevant inscription; original sanatorium-era photographs with identified buildings and dates, particularly St. Joseph, Presbyterian, and the East Central Avenue corridor; Jake W. Spidle Doctors of Medicine UNM Press 1986 first hardcover inscribed to a significant NM medical figure; Sheila Rothman Living in the Shadow of Death Basic Books 1994 first hardcover signed; Richard Lowitt Bronson M. Cutting UNM Press 1992 first hardcover signed; original sanatorium promotional brochures and annual reports from the 1900s-1920s with institutional photographs; Clinton P. Anderson Outsider in the Senate World Publishing 1970 first hardcover signed by Anderson.

Tier 2 (respectable collectible value): Owen Lewis Chasing the Cure unsigned first hardcover in fine condition with dust jacket; Spidle Doctors of Medicine unsigned first hardcover; Spidle The Lovelace Medical Center UNM Press 1987 first hardcover; Rothman Living in the Shadow of Death unsigned first hardcover; Abel Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion Rutgers 2007 first hardcover; Lowitt Bronson M. Cutting unsigned first hardcover; Anderson Outsider in the Senate unsigned first hardcover; Katherine Ott Fevered Lives Harvard 1996 first hardcover; Mark Caldwell The Last Crusade Atheneum 1988 first hardcover; Erna Fergusson Albuquerque Merle Armitage 1947 first; Marc Simmons Albuquerque: A Narrative History UNM Press 1982 first; later Bureau of Immigration pamphlets (1900s-1910s) in good condition; sanatorium postcards and promotional materials from the 1910s-1930s; institutional histories of Presbyterian Healthcare Services and Lovelace with historical photographs.

Tier 3 (under the mid-range threshold): Owen Lewis Chasing the Cure paperback reprint; Rothman Living in the Shadow of Death Johns Hopkins paperback; Abel Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion paperback edition; Spidle paperback reprints if issued; general American TB history paperbacks (Dubos and Dubos The White Plague, Frank Ryan The Forgotten Plague); NM medical society centennial and anniversary publications; Presbyterian Healthcare Services institutional histories and anniversary publications; Lovelace corporate histories; Fort Stanton interpretive publications and visitor guides; New Mexico Historic Preservation Division survey publications documenting sanatorium-era architecture; UNM Health Sciences Center historical publications; general NM city histories (Simmons, Bryan) with sanatorium-era chapters; reproduction Bureau of Immigration promotional materials.

I pick up books for free anywhere in the metro area. Call 702-496-4214 to schedule.

NMLP Intake Position

Tuberculosis and health-seeker books arrive in NMLP donation pickups with moderate but consistent frequency, typically from estate collections of New Mexico history enthusiasts, retired healthcare professionals with institutional connections to Presbyterian or Lovelace, and families with multi-generational roots in Albuquerque's sanatorium-era neighborhoods. Donor demographic concentration: retired physicians and nurses from Presbyterian Healthcare Services and Lovelace with accumulated NM medical-history libraries; Albuquerque families whose grandparents or great-grandparents arrived as health-seekers and retained family papers and books; UNM history and public-health faculty downsizing personal libraries; Silver City and Las Vegas NM estate donors with local-history collections that include sanatorium-era documentation.

NMLP routes Tier 1 trophy items — signed Owen Lewis first hardcovers, Spidle inscribed firsts, original Bureau of Immigration pamphlets, sanatorium photographs and ephemera, signed Lowitt Cutting biography, signed Anderson autobiography — to specialist Western Americana and medical-history dealers (Heritage Auctions, William Reese Company, B&L Rootenberg rare medical books, Swann Galleries medical and scientific literature sales). Tier 2 unsigned firsts and significant regional titles route through SellBooksABQ standard hand-sort with NM-history and medical-history collector outreach. Tier 3 paperback reprints, institutional histories, and general TB histories route to APS Title I schools (NM history curriculum includes health-seeker content), UNM Health Sciences Library and Zimmerman Library, the Albuquerque Museum research library, Fort Stanton Historic Site interpretive library, and community literacy programs.

Free statewide pickup with no condition limit and no minimum quantity — schedule your pickup or text/call 702-496-4214.

External References

Related on This Site

Cite This Guide

Eldred, J. (May 2026). Collecting New Mexico Tuberculosis, Health-Seekers, and Sanatorium-Era Books: The Literature of the Lunger Migration and the Climate Cure. New Mexico Literacy Project.

https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/new-mexico-tuberculosis-health-seekers-sanatorium-books-collecting

Content is original research by Josh Eldred. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Cite with attribution.