Documenting a Deadly Disease: Tuberculosis and Waverly Hills Sanatorium in the Filson’s Collections

A four-story stone and brick Tudor Gothic revival style building, once part of Waverly Hills Sanatorium, still stands in 2021 as a tourist site and as a testament to struggles with a deadly disease. Located on the south end of Jefferson County and now in the city limits of Louisville, Kentucky, the building, with its distinctive tower, was designed by D. X. Murphy and opened in 1926, adding four hundred additional beds to Waverly Hills facilities for tuberculosis patients. The massive structure looms large in the history of tuberculosis in Louisville, but it was not the only means of combating the city’s high rates of the disease. Public health advocates managed the Free Tuberculosis Dispensary on West Chestnut Street, hired a corps of traveling nurses, sponsored educational campaigns, and supported anti-spitting laws. In 1907, the Louisville Tuberculosis Association established Hazelwood Sanatorium for the treatment of white patients from any part of Kentucky, even before Waverly Hills Sanatorium opened, in 1910, for city and county residents.

The 400-bed hospital that opened in 1926 at Waverly Hills Sanatorium. Edward A. Arthur Waverly Hills photograph collection, 019PC9, Filson Historical Society.

The Filson Historical Society holds a wide range of collections documenting individual experiences of tuberculosis and collective efforts to manage the disease. These include nineteenth-century correspondence, diaries, and medical publications in which Kentuckians wrote of debilitating symptoms and possible treatments. Early-twentieth-century scrapbooks and organizational records chronicle public health measures and tuberculosis facilities in Louisville and other parts of the state. Last, a rich variety of records from the early and mid-twentieth century—including pamphlets, photographs, letters, and architectural records—help document the history of Waverly Hills Sanatorium from the perspective of administrators and some of the employees and patients who lived there. These records shed light on public services that often reached across lines of class and race. At the same time they also reveal stark racial disparities in mortality rates and institutional treatment.

In the nineteenth century, tuberculosis killed as many as one in seven people in the United States. Consumption was the most common name for pulmonary tuberculosis, the form of the disease that affected the lungs and, per its name, seemed to consume the body as it progressed in stages over many years. Nineteenth-century correspondence and diaries in the Filson’s manuscript collections document the understandings and experiences of ordinary people, primarily white Kentuckians, as they struggled with the disease. Letter-writers described the symptoms of consumption, such as “drenching night sweats,” constant coughing, lack of appetite, weakness, and swollen extremities. In 1849, Ann Beatty wrote to her mother about her attacks of “spitting blood”—one of the most dreaded symptoms—and expressed her fear of developing the disease: “Pa says that if I am not very careful he thinks I will have consumption. I would like to live and watch over and take care of my poor Fatherless children.” Individuals worried about their health as well as about their family responsibilities and livelihood. In 1873, Agatha Logan Marshall wrote matter-of-factly to her brother-in-law Thomas W. Bullitt about her recent diagnosis of consumption and her concerns about her future well-being and economic security: “Dr Bush made an examination of my lungs and told me they were very seriously involved—a fact I have known all along—of course I am in no immediate danger for consumption is a lingering disease but I have no hope or expectation of ever being well again and I am very anxious if possible to have my little prosperity so it will yield me an income.” Marshall aptly characterized consumption as a “lingering disease,” one in which symptoms could come and go and progress slowly over years. It was also a disease that could end in a painful death. In 1850, James Stewart wrote of a friend who suffered “exquisite pain” during almost nine months spent in bed. Upon death, “he fell asleep as we hope in the arms of his savior.”¹

Few records...