Lungs, land and laws: How legislation defined tuberculosis care in Minnesota

The Minnesota State Sanatorium for Consumptives opened in 1907 on the shore of Leech Lake, surrounded by piney forests. The location and laws ruling the sanatorium reflected the predominant medical beliefs about tuberculosis in the early twentieth century. Over the following three decades, clinical treatment for tuberculosis advanced quickly. These changes made keeping up with current standards of treatment for sanatorium patients difficult, as features of the sanatorium and its laws that had once been logical became dated or impossible to work with. During the 1920s, the sanatorium’s superintendent was allowed to ignore or selectively invoke the laws and was able to compensate for changing treatment standards by having new buildings constructed or repurposed. When a new, less tactful sanatorium supervisor took over the sanatorium at the end of the decade and into the Depression years, the State Board of Control, which had oversight over the sanatorium, allowed him significantly less leeway. Although some new buildings were constructed, the sanatorium was consistently understaffed and underfunded, leading to a variety of conflicts as the sanatorium’s location and state laws became a point of contention.