Just down the road from Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, a row of boarded-up Craftsman-style bungalows marches down to a shallow green ravine, flanked by large, empty dormitory buildings. Along narrow walking paths, memorial plaques pay tribute to long-forgotten Angelenos who spent years of their lives at this place.
The bowl-like ravine holds one of the best-preserved sanatoriums west of the Mississippi. Founded in 1902 as a haven for people with tuberculosis (TB), Barlow Sanatorium flirted with irrelevance by the 1960s. As antibiotics transformed TB from a lasting malady into a more curable condition, sanatoriums like Barlow, which could host patients for years on end, were no longer necessary.
Today, Barlow’s campus—an entire time-capsule neighborhood—is full of reminders of the insular society that once thrived there: a lonely cluster of beehives, a scarred wooden coop where patients raised chickens, a black-barred aviary that now encloses a koi pond. But while the community may be gone, the institution has persisted, physically and philosophically merging past with present.
The main 1927 treatment building, where outdoor TB beds were once arrayed under Spanish-style arches, now houses the state-of-the-art Barlow Respiratory Hospital, which has perfected the delicate art of weaning patients with respiratory conditions from ventilators. Barlow’s specialty has given it high-profile status during the COVID pandemic—and its historical legacy offers fresh perspective not just on treating long-term respiratory illness, but also on meeting future infectious threats.
In the early 1900s, TB inspired the kind of fear that COVID-19 would a century later. Though scientists knew that the so-called “white plague” was caused by a rod-shaped bacterium that destroys lung tissue, no drugs existed to treat the disease, and it was killing Americans at the rate of more than 400 a day. “People were so scared,” says Soumi Eachampati, a former surgical ICU director at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “The scale of TB devastation was incredible.” Around the country, sanatoriums sprang up with the twin goals of isolating infectious patients while putting them in open-air environments that were thought to promote recovery.