Historical research provides a useful social distancing mechanism, offering the opportunity to approach old problems in new ways and to see new problems using a little-remembered frame of reference. This study focuses on the preventorium, a little remembered solution to the early twentieth century tuberculosis (TB) epidemic. The 1907 finding that large numbers of children harbored the TB bacillus galvanized public health activists to implement numerous child-focused initiatives.

In this paper I will analyze the preventorium movement, an early twentieth century crusade intended to prevent TB. The nation’s first preventorium addressed what experts perceived to be a growing TB crisis in New York City between 1900 and 1910. Tuberculosis incidence was especially high among poorer and immigrant populations, pressing New York’s public health leaders to take action. Believing that sickly offspring of indigent and immigrant tubercular parents suffered from ‘physiological poverty’, many such children were sent to preventoria in an effort to minimize their disease risk. Determining which children went to institutions, how long they stayed, and what the institutions looked like was the product of negotiations between families, health care providers, as well as the formal and informal structures involved in public health in New York City. The first institution opened in 1909 and and by the 1920s, dozens of preventoria were in operation throughout the United States. The preventorium crusade is little remembered but its central precept, determining whether or not a child hails from a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ home environment, is embedded in contemporary American health care delivery and social policy.

Seminar Pictures Dr. Cindy Connolly presenting her research on the history of Pediatric Tuberculosis.

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