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The idea was to constrict the patient’s breathing. Then there was “laying flat on your back for months with a sandbag on your chest,” as former patient Barbara Collins, 62, described her treatment. The mildest of these included sleeping outside on the porch all year round. Once in Olive View, patients were subjected to a regimen that medical director Ziment called “the Castorp treatments,” after a character in “The Magic Mountain” the Thomas Mann novel of a tuberculosis sanitarium. “When I got home, my son called me by my first name.” He had to be taught to call her mom. It was heartbreaking,” said 68-year-old Esperanza (Patty) G. Her daughter Rosemary Matea, who came with her to the anniversary, recalled being brought to the sanitarium to glimpse her mother through a window-she was not permitted to see her in person.
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Rose Robideaux, now 84, was 29 years old and had five children and a husband at home when she was ordered away to the sanitarium. Others mentioned they had to fight to retain custody.Īll said they had never questioned the orders of the L.A. Some left children in foster homes while they were isolated. The former tuberculosis patients who came to Olive View Friday included retired aerospace workers, painters, homemakers and technicians. A place called Hillcrest was set aside for Japanese patients-"in the early ‘40s, they weren’t welcome anywhere else,” Black explained. There was a home for Jewish people that served only Kosher food, one for men, one for women, and one for Catholic girls.
#TB SANITARIUM PLUS#
The county was probably among the first jurisdictions to start locking up patients, adhering to a policy Ziment called “dogma, discipline and determination.” Money was set aside in 1920 to buy 300 acres for the sanitarium, which opened with 90 patients.īy the 1940s, there were more than 1,000 patients at Olive View, plus another 1,200 sent to rest homes in the area, Black said. Olive View owes its start to the fact that Los Angeles County led the nation in its aggressive stance toward tuberculosis, Black said. “They were salad makers, waiters, dishwashers.” Not because they had a disease, but because they were spreading it,” he said. They were imprisoned in special quarters in Lancaster, Black said.
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Those who refused to comply soon found sheriff’s deputies knocking at their doors. Many of the former patients who visited Friday had been ordered from their homes, denied access to their families, locked up and subjected to horrifying and probably ineffective treatments-such as having their ribs removed to induce collapse of a lung. The cuts-which meant the loss of nearly 500 Olive View workers through layoffs and transfers-were still fresh in people’s minds.īut although the layoffs were mentioned frequently in formal speeches, the present difficulties were as unfamiliar to the dozens of former workers and patients in attendance as the glass high-rise that has replaced the old wards they knew.
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Since its days as a home for those patients, it’s been rebuilt, leveled by an earthquake, and moved and rebuilt once again.Īnd only a few weeks ago, the hospital endured its latest tribulation-massive layoffs to help deal with Los Angeles County’s fiscal crisis. There were speeches and cake Friday to honor the hospital that has been transformed into a modern facility from a collection of wood-frame buildings where the sick and dying tuberculosis patients were forced by law to stay. “But a better term might have been a prisob,” said Irwin Ziment, medical director of Olive View UCLA Medical Center, which has been celebrating its 75th year this week. In the early days, it was called a sanitarium.