In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • "They Can't Help Getting Well Here":Seaside Hospitals for Children in the United States: 1872–1917
  • Meghan Crnic (bio) and Cynthia Connolly (bio)

On a hot July afternoon in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt eagerly stepped off his yacht onto the beach at New York's Coney Island to inspect Sea Breeze, a tent colony for children with tuberculosis (TB) that had developed a reputation for working miraculous cures on its young charges. After touring the facility and speaking with the nurses, doctors, dignitaries, and forty-four young patients, some on crutches, who greeted him, Roosevelt paused and shifted his eyes toward the ocean. Removing his hat, he turned his tanned face to the sun and wind, smiled and exclaimed, "Ha . . . they can't help getting well here."1

Roosevelt's enthusiasm for the curative nature of a maritime climate reflected ancient wisdom, emerging science, and changing ideas about children and childhood in the United States. As far back as Greek philosopher A. Cornelius Celsus, born in 25 B.C., the benefits of salt-laden air and other "climatological" ideas captivated healers.2 But physicians who subscribed to the emerging germ theory of infectious disease causation also heralded salt air's therapeutic potential. Elite American physicians who studied in Europe remarked upon the continent's numerous seaside hospitals for children, like France's Bercksur Mer which opened in 1861 and had treated hundreds of children a year by the early twentieth century. Regardless of their location, these hospitals reported that nearly all ill children "improved" and many were even considered "cured." It appears that doctors used such terminology to refer to the remission or elimination of symptoms, as well as to weight gain and increased attention span in patients. In discussions of their patients, physicians noted that they were especially impressed by the improvement of children with "Pott's Disease" (TB of the spine) and "scrofula" (TB of the cervical lymph nodes), once considered [End Page 220] unrelated to "consumption" (pulmonary TB), but later understood as caused by the same microscopic organism.3

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, long-standing ideas about TB were in rapid transition. Before 1882, when Robert Koch identified the tubercle bacillus, doctors, nurses, and lay people alike believed that "miasmas" caused internal chemical changes that resulted in TB. "Sanitarians," as they were known, also believed in a correlation between illness and morality. They argued that people who lived in cramped, dirty, disease-infested areas became sick more frequently because they were impure spiritually. Koch's findings challenged these notions. Although the work of late nineteenth-century bacteriological scientists ultimately ushered in a new scientific era underpinned by the germ theory, older ideas that filth caused disease especially in the context of immoral behavior or "bad heredity," continued to inform not just popular thought, but also medical and nursing practice. Despite shifting ideas regarding TB causation, scientists and physicians were unable to produce an effective pharmaceutical treatment until the 1940s. Thus, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, food, fresh air, and rest remained the cornerstones of therapy.4

This paper focuses on two pediatric seaside hospitals, both of which treated tubercular children at popular seaside destinations: the Children's Sea Shore House (CSSH), founded as a summer hospital in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1872, and Coney Island's Sea Breeze, the first such facility in the United States to remain open year round.5 By the turn of the twentieth century, both Atlantic City and Coney Island had earned reputations as popular vacation spots for urban residents. Established in the mid-nineteenth century, boosters promoted Atlantic City as a health resort known for its sunshine and ozone-laden air. By the 1870s, approximately five hundred thousand members of Philadelphia's middle and upper classes journeyed to Atlantic City each year to take advantage of its salubrious sea air, as well as its famous boardwalk.6 Coney Island enjoyed an even wider popularity, attracting up to two hundred thousand visitors on a single day. Largely drawing visitors from New York City, members of all social classes went to Coney Island to experience its spectacular amusements, bathe at the beach, and participate...

pdf

Share