Archaeologies of Tuberculosis Sanatoria in California

This dissertation examines the material culture of everyday life at the Weimar Joint Sanatorium for Tuberculosis and the intersectionality of identities, such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, disability, and age in healthcare systems in California. This research draws on thought from historical archaeology, architecture, medical anthropology, folklore, and disability studies. Ideas about health and disease permeate almost every aspect of everyday material culture in the 20th century. Artifacts such as ceramic dishes, sewer pipes, and chain link fences are connected to health ideologies which have been materialized in the landscape and daily practices. Understanding processes of object and subject formation, agency, and individuality can assist in learning how material culture becomes connected to ideas about health and disease and processes of identification.Tuberculosis sanatoria were long-term resident hospitals where patients would live for several months or years while battling tuberculosis. These institutions mostly existed before antibiotics were discovered but after germ theory, so the main treatment approach at that time focused on strengthening the immune system by living in a healthy environment and doing daily practices which were thought to be healthy. The treatment generally involved sunlight, fresh air, or high altitude, resting, and a special diet. The major case study for this project is Weimar Joint Sanatorium in Placer County, California. The Weimar Joint Sanatorium was opened in 1919 and continued to operate until 1972. It changed names to the Weimar Medical Center to reflect a change in focus in the fifties and sixties after tuberculosis rates dropped but continued to treat some tuberculosis patients. The sanatorium property was sold to a doctor who operated a private hospital, but it ran into financial and legal trouble and was closed shortly afterwards. The site was then used as a relocation center for Vietnamese refugees during the Vietnam War. Afterwards, it became the Weimar Institute, a Seventh-Day Adventist health center and school focusing on a variety of conditions, including mental health, diabetes, and obesity. The methods used in this project include mapping, geophysical survey, historical archaeology artifact analysis, archival research, and collecting oral history interviews. Oral histories and archival research describe experiences, memories, and social context. Mapping, geophysical survey, pedestrian survey, and artifact analysis were used to document the landscape and material culture at the sanatorium site. The theoretical direction followed in this project is influenced by queer theory, disability studies, and psychoanalysis. The material culture of everyday life is studied not only to describe what life was like in the past at the sanatorium, but to question normalcy in contemporary everyday life. In this dissertation archaeology is not just a process of uncovering the past. Everyday life continues to be remembered by descendants and people who lived and worked at the sanatorium who are still alive, and there is a rich and extensive documentary archive. Rather, archaeology is a practice of examining the past to render visible the present. Queer theory focuses on destabilizing normative assumptions and recognizing norms is an important part of this process. Everyday life can give insight into normative assumptions, however everyday practices and material culture become so mundane that they are no longer noticeable or remembered. Psychoanalytic approaches to the everyday ascribe importance to detail which are forgotten or misremembered. Disability studies expands ideas about the relationship between human bodies, material culture, and the environment, and relates processes of subject and object formation to inequality and access. Through studying material culture and landscape, this project found that notions of the human body were dynamic and actively negotiated in the twentieth century, and this process was materialized in the landscape and material culture. In my analysis of sewer pipes, I discuss how contemporary urban and rural landscapes were built to reflect a human body, which was then intended to reflect health back onto people inhabiting that landscape. Likewise, the use of window glass or screens, now taken for granted in most buildings, could be interpreted as a health technology which was expected to have major physical impacts on the people inhabiting the built environment. The chapter on chain link fences focuses on issues of visibility, and the performative influence of borders and boundaries play not only on people inside the fence, but on the decisions and choices of people outside the fence. The chapter on ceramics focuses on the role of white and green ceramics in delineating institutional versus domestic spaces. Unlike fences or walls ceramics are not usually seen as spatial boundaries, but nonetheless work to perform a separation space, place, and people. Finally, this dissertation examines ghost stories told about sanatorium spaces to critically examine the role that these spaces play in contemporary memory. In these stories, the word sanatorium gets displaced to refer to asylums. This misremembering of the word sanatorium situates the uncanny at a problematic division between mind and body. Ghost stories and archaeology both seek out the uncanny in everyday objects, and this final chapter explores the idea of archaeology as telling ghost stories.

Advisor: Wilkie, Laurie