The Weimar Joint Sanatorium: Institutional Landscapes, Identification, and Disease

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Year: 
2019
Journal/Series title: 
ARF Brownbag Series, UC Berkeley
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Place published: 
California
Abstract: 
The Weimar Joint Sanatorium was opened in 1919 in Weimar, California, and was jointly operated by up to eleven counties in California for the care of tuberculosis patients who were unable to pay for treatment. Additionally, the Weimar Joint Sanatorium was located next to the town of Colfax which had at least six privately owned sanatoria, and the popularity of tuberculosis sanatoria during the early twentieth-century was closely linked to broader social movements such as changing understandings of disease and contagion, the health and hygiene movement, and a greater interest in exercise, the outdoors, and the natural environment. This project tracks the design and transformation of this institutional landscape using archaeological survey, ground penetrating radar (GPR), magnetometer survey, historical research, and oral histories. The built environment, daily practices, and the landscape are closely entangled with ideas about disease, contagion, stigma, processes of identification, and the social memory of epidemics, and this presentation will discuss the intersection between healthcare systems and racialized and gendered landscapes in California.