Waverly Hills Sanatorium~

This was my beloved grandmother Hazel Howell.  She died many years before I was born from Tuberculosis at the now world famous Waverly Hills Sanitorium~ 

Waverly Hills Sanitorium took 2 years to build and opened in 1926. The top 3 floors had open air solariums where all patients were taken daily for 13 hours, 365 days a year. The electric blanket came about as a result of these patients needing fresh air every day, even in the cold winter months~

This bottle of wine on display was dated 1923, the same year that my grandmother passed away in what was to have been the first Waverly Hills Hospital.  They began the building of the larger building one year later, right next to the first building~




The morgue was having to deal with over 24 deaths per day at the worst time of the TB epidemic and 64,000 patients lost their lives in this hospital before a cure was found~

This is the one room where all surgeries were performed. The physicians would use a method by which they would puncture and then deflated the lung and then place sandbags on the patient for a long number of days and then re inflate the lung in hopes that the lung would be stronger~

The "body chute"...used first for deliveries of food and things needed to run the facility. When it came about that one patient was dying every hour, those living became discouraged and so since the morgue was at opposite end of the chute, the administration decided that this would be the best way to exit the bodies, so the surviving patients did not have to witness it~

Many of the patients had large rooms with their own bathrooms. Others were housed in wards depending on their individual needs. Once the patients became near death, they were moved to small, more private rooms, and new patients moved in to the larger rooms, never leaving any empty beds, they were constantly filling up, as patients passed away~

Room 502 is the one room where even a worst tragedy occurred while all of the disease was going rampant. It may be the most famous section of the hospital. One of the head nurses hanged herself in this room in 1928. She was 29, single and pregnant, possibly by one of the leading physicians there. Then in the same room in 1932, another nurse who had worked in room 502, jumped to her death from a hospital balcony~

 

Women lived on one floor, some with children, while other children were in a children's ward, if they had no family. Men had their own floor~

 

I invite you to check out more 'Skywatch Friday' posts from around the world at:


http://skyley.blogspot.com/