He Busot Sanatorium, Alicante; he of Caesurae, Coruna; the one of La Barranca, Madrid; that of Sierra Espuña, Murcia; that of Agramonte in Zaragoza… The Spanish geography is full of strange, shady places, invaded by stories and secrets. Each province has its own, lost in the mountains, half destroyed, full of mysteries.
What are they? Why are they there? What story is behind?
All the pandemics that one day were
Scanning electron micrograph of M. tuberculosis | CDC
In the mid-19th century, tuberculosis was one of the plagues of the apocalypse. We do not have precise figures, but it is estimated that, by 1815, “the disease was so prevalent that it prematurely killed about a quarter of the inhabitants of Europe; in the cities of the eastern United States, the death rate from tuberculosis was of the order of 400 per 100,000 inhabitants.”
For centuries, moreover, it was thought to be a hereditary disease, and during all that time, doctors worked to find clinical solutions to a problem they didn’t even understand. At the beginning of the 19th century, this consensus was beginning to make it clear that the usual practice of “relegating tuberculosis patients to cramped rooms and with meager food” was a bad idea.
From time immemorial the open air had been recommended to treat disease; but the first one who really took it seriously was the German doctor Herman Brehmer who opened a mountain establishment and wrote a book with wide circulation in which he “recommended exercise at heights and abundant food, since the lower atmospheric pressure would require an increase in heart function and activate the metabolism.”
The boom in tuberculosis sanatoriums.
Sanatoriums then lived a golden age that, in 1882, robert koch found in Germany the bacillus that now bears his name and caused the disease. People began to think that if the disease was contagious, taking patients to an isolated place could be a problem. Then they realized that, without useful drugs to stop the disease, there were no better solutions.
“At Brehmer’s death in 1899, there were already more than 300 sanatoriums in Germany alone. […]; in 1906 there were 69 sanatoriums in England and Wales […]; in the United States in 1904 it was 115, in 1953 it reached 839 establishments”, explained Ignacio Duarte. In Spain, we can find something very similar. Many of the large sanitariums began to be built in the 1920’s and 1930’s, but it was not enough. “In 1934, Spain, with 66 sanatoriums, was the country with the lowest ratio of centers per inhabitant in all of Europe, one for every 357,000.”
For this reason, the Civil War (and the collapse of the health infrastructure that it entailed) was what ended up promoting the creation of facilities throughout the territory. The National Tuberculosis Board created in 1943 he prepared ‘model’ designs and began to fill the mountain with sanitariums and dispensaries. Late, as usual, because in the 1950s new medical approaches made them obsolete. And, although some were converted into psychiatric hospitals, they were forgotten.
Oblivion, mystery and a tourist possibility that we have not been able to take advantage of
Over time, these isolated places linked to the disease were filled with stories, legends and mythologies. Now they have become sites that attract visitors, despite the fact that (in many cases) they are in terrible condition. And it’s a shame.
Above all, because they are the country’s scientific heritage; a heritage that we are losing.
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Image | Sanatorium of Caesuras and La Barranca, Miguel Branco | Agramonte Sanatorium | Benjamin Nunez Gonzalez
