Marilyn and I are fans of the PBS series “Call the Midwife,” a BBC period drama based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth and set in east London in the 1950s. And while the majority of the episodes involve some aspect of midwifery, there are also subordinate story lines that touch on a number of other health and societal issues of the ’50s: racism, poverty, romances, etc.
One such issue in the most recently completed season was about tuberculosis, a chronic bacterial disease that affects the respiratory system, but might also affect other areas of the body. It’s highly contagious and can be debilitating or fatal. In that particular episode of “Midwife,” one of the characters, a young nun, goes to a “sanitorium” to be treated, to rest and to recover.
That episode touched the rewind button in my brain, and I went reeling back to my grade school days and memories of my Grandma Thompson whose health (or lack of it) led doctors to believe she had somehow contracted tuberculosis, or TB, as it was called in our house. Grandma Sue was always “sickly.” She was a skinny little woman who seldom smiled, and she coughed a lot, frequently coughing up large amounts of phlegm and sometimes blood, classic symptoms of tuberculosis.
So the doctors recommended that she be checked in to a facility near De Pere called Hickory Grove Sanitarium. (Notice, it’s “sanitarium,” not “sanitorium.” I never knew the difference between the words until I started writing this and looked it up. They’re the same thing!) So Grandma went there. At Hickory Grove, they decided she didn’t have TB, but she was kept there for several months so she could build up her strength.
Grandma actually went back for two more stints at the “san” because she relapsed to her previous sickliness and coughing. Each time she was diagnosed as having no TB despite all her symptoms and was dismissed after a few months of rehabilitation. Her rehabs never made a significant difference; Grandma never became healthy. She was a wonderfully sweet lady, but I can’t ever remember her being healthy.
I have vague remembrances of Hickory Grove. It sat atop a tree-covered hill overlooking the Fox River in a rural area between Wrightstown and De Pere. I can remember that when our parents would go to visit Grandma Sue at the sanitarium, my sister Joyce and I would have to stay outside in the yard because of the highly contagious nature of TB. We’d have to stay in a certain part of the yard, so Mom could see us and Grandma Sue could wave at us from her fourth-floor room.
Tuberculosis was a scary thing back in my grade school days. The older people talked about “consumption,” a disease that had been around for centuries. It was a frightening thing, and all of us kids had to get TB skin tests in school.
I think it was the county nurse who’d come to St. Anthony’s and set up a little clinic. Supposedly the skin test would tell if you had ever had TB bacteria in your body. A little bubble of harmless fluid was injected under your skin on the inside of your forearm. A very small needle was used so it was practically painless. We were told not to cover it with a bandage or put any lotion or medication on it, and definitely not to scratch it, no matter how much it may itch. And, of course, the suggestion that it might itch was enough for us to imagine that it did itch!
It was a definite topic of conversation for a couple of days, all of us comparing the spots on our arms and trying to decide each other’s prognoses. Then two or three days after the injection, the nurse would come back and examine our arms and measure any bump that might still be there.
I can vaguely remember that a few kids were referred to their doctors and had to have a chest X-ray, but I can’t ever recall anyone who was actually diagnosed with TB in our school. Some were described as “carriers,” whatever that was. Chest X-rays remained a major part of physicals for many years after the ’50s.
Author’s note: There was an article in the Wisconsin State Journal on July 7 about an “outbreak” of TB in the Sheboygan area.
You can check it out here: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/health_med_fit/sheboygan-outbreak....
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