Summer 1998
NHF's mission directs it to illuminate the present in the light of the past, and sometimes that happens in unexpected ways. Such is the case with the Talbot and Barbara Hackett Collection.
The five 16mm reels donated by the Hacketts, of Warren, Maine, were shot in 1934 at the Western Maine Sanatorium, in Hebron. Even as tuberculosis threatens a resurgence, it's intriguing to visit that institution and the philosophy behind it.
Decades after tuberculosis exited from everyday reality, its stereotypes stay with us. The dying beauty made exquisite by her pallor. Kafka feverish over his pages. The persistence of such romanticized images is a measure of TB's impact. Such histories as Sheila Rothman's Living in the Shadow of Death show how evolving treatments for TB, once America's most serious health threat, wrought dramatic social change.
Fresh Air vs. Bacillus
Witness the sanatorium movement. Once people realized how the tubercle bacillus spread, isolation was the order of the day. The sanatoriums tried their best to support the patient's own recuperative powers, but their real contribution lay in getting the afflicted away from the healthy.
The Hackett films make the best of the situation. Writer-producer Bill Sinclair and cameraman E.O. Irish concentrated on festivities--a Fourth of July celebration and a day of winter frolics--virtually all filmed outdoors. (Film speed also determined the choice to film in natural light.)
"It was the idea of fresh air," explains Marge Anderson. Anderson is head of library services at Mercy Hospital, in Portland, Maine. A historian, she owns the Western Maine Sanatorium's paper records. Tuberculosis was thought to be a product of dirty, crowded cities, Anderson says. "They believed that fresh air, sunshine and a healthful way of living would protect the people who already had tuberculosis, and enable them to cure themselves."
Fate and the Flea Market
Anderson and Dr. Richard Kahn, of Union, discovered the sanatorium materials at the Hacketts' flea market. One of four sanatoriums in Maine, the Hebron facility opened in 1901. Dr. Lester Adams, longtime director, kept many of the records when the facility closed in 1959. He died in 1971, survived by his wife, Violet. The Hacketts purchased the contents of the Adams household, in Thomaston, following Mrs. Adams' death in 1991.
They didn't know what to do with the sanatorium records and the films, says Mrs. Hackett. "The ordinary person wasn't going to buy them," she says. "They said, 'If you want them, take them,' " Anderson recalls. Dr. Kahn noticed the films as he and Anderson were leaving the market. He suggested that the Hacketts consider donating them to NHF, with which, as program chair for the Union Historical Society, he has a longstanding relationship.
The Hacketts wanted to ensure that the films went where they would be wanted. "The films might do someone some good someday, but it had to be the right person," says Mrs. Hackett. The Adams materials also included financial records, patient and death lists, many of Adams' speeches, and minutes of the directors' meetings of the National Tuberculosis Association of Maine.
"I have a letter from [Dr. Adams'] daughter that says he started to put these things in a scrapbook, and then ran out of glue, and never resumed that chore," Anderson says. She is transcribing and organizing the documents with the goal of using them in a history of public health in Maine.
From Compulsion to Suggestion
Why are these materials relevant now? For Anderson, they speak to the changing role of the public health establishment. Tuberculosis, around the turn of the century, really brought that establishment into being, she says.
Today, as our views of individual rights have evolved, the public health system's role has become one of providing information and guidance. In view of contemporary pandemics, that role is not always considered adequate. In 1934, the system was accepted as being appropriately authoritarian.
"The public health system was able to march in with tuberculosis, take charge, isolate the people, treat them, track down anyone who was in contact with them, discover if they'd been infected, and treat them," Anderson says.
In addition, in view of the way TB has been romanticized by people who haven't had to live with it, the films' role as pure historical record shouldn't be underestimated. "This is pretty unusual, it seems to me, seeing people in a sanatorium," says Dr. Kahn.
TB's Real Face
The films are thought provoking as much for what they don't show as for what they do. There are glimpses of the buildings on a lovely site in Maine's western hills, and views of patients on the screen porches. One emaciated, bedridden woman with a dazzling smile puts a real face on the situation.
But mostly we see activity: sports, parades, roughhousing. Who'd have thought that there'd be so much energy at a sanatorium? Moreover, so few of these activities remain in our repertoire. The Fourth of July festivity includes such archaic games as potato races and a rolling pin toss. (A dummy in male clothing is the target.) A skit depicts a shotgun wedding. A parade through the grounds includes a blackface minstrel band. More has changed than how we treat disease.