Collapse and Expand: Architecture and Tuberculosis Therapy in Montreal, 1909, 1933, 1954

This paper explores the complex reflexive relationships among technologies associated with tuberculosis care and treatment: the fresh air cure, surgical collapse therapy, architecture, and chemotherapy. We review the architectural histories of the Royal Edward Laurentian Hospital (now the Montreal Chest Institute) to track important transformations of treatment environments. We recount how the rest-cure prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century started a tradition, lasting until the age of antibiotics, in which architectural settings were deployed as physical agents of treatment. A technology in this sense, then, is a set of resource-using practices marshaled to eradicate the disease. We argue that the endurance of specialized tuberculosis architecture, with its porches, balconies, and sunning galleries, provided crucial material and spatial continuity for therapy, even after chemotherapy’s successes augured the end of dedicated tuberculosis hospitals and sanatoria.