My mother worked at a place called The Hospital Annex.I didn't know what that was at the time,even long after I saw the building.Most of the buildings down along Collishaw street at that time were old military buildings.Had they remained in military hands,they might have kept better than they did.Only twenty years after the war ended they were looking dingy and a bit less than well kept.The Hospital Annex was in one of these buildings,more or less right on the corner of Collishaw and Killiam Drive.It was very much typical of the buildings in the area.Kind of long and narrow,painted black and white,and a bit run down looking.It didn't look anything like a hospital to me.It wasn't really far from our house,so I suppose my mother walked there,and that's why I can remember waving to her from our back door.But there were not all the through street that there are now,so she may have walked through one of the trails in the woods.The Hospital Annex was,in fact a hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis is an ancient disease,going far back in human history.I recall hearing somewhere that there is evidence of it in remains of Egyptian mummies.It is said to have reached it's peak in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,then declined until the later part of the twentieth century when resistant strains began to emerge.Mostly it is a disease of the lungs,but other parts of the body can be affected as well.It was also known as consumption,for the fact that one of it's symptoms was consuming weight loss.The bodies of those infected could seem to waste away.Until quite recently,a diagnosis of tuberculosis was a death sentence,though death would often take a long time to claim it's victim.
In the late 1800'sTuberculosis had been recognized as being an infectious disease,and better treatment protocols were being developed,though anything approximating a cure was still years away.Doctors would collapse the lungs of patients,to allow infected tissue to heal,a treatment that was helpful to some degree.Another approach to treatment involved dedicating hospital beds to the care of tuberculosis,and thus sanatoriums were developed to provide treatment specific to tuberculosis.It was also thought that clean,clear air was helpful in recovery,so sanatoriums tended to be located away from major population centers.The first sanatorium in The United States was opened in Saranac Lake,New York,in 1885.It was followed by the first in Canada,at Muskoka,Ontario eleven years later.By the 1930's there were more than sixty sanatoriums in Canada,including one in River Glade, New Brunswick,about a half hours drive from where we lived in Moncton.Conditions within sanatoriums were said to range from resort like to prison like,where poor people with the disease often did not recover.I really have no idea what conditions were like inside The Jordan Sanatorium in River Glade,as my memories of the place are memories of being outside the building.
No body ever mention the purpose of either The Hospital Annex or The Jordan Sanatorium to me.I learned about the Hospital Annex from my grade six teacher who described it as a terrible,very sad place,and then it gradually dawned on me why it didn't look much like a hospital.
As I've said,some of my mothers family were staying with us in Moncton shortly after we moved there.Both my Grandmother and my Aunt Ruby were there.And I think it must have been about that time that my grandmother's sister,my great aunt,Anna English was in Moncton too.More specifically she was in River Glade,at the sanatorium.
We had no thoughts of things like tuberculosis when we were small.We lived in a world where our mother did not acknowledge any kind of unkindness or impurity,and I suppose that it was not a bad place for children to live,at least while they were still children.But it also leaves me with a cloudy sense of family history.While we played happily by day and went to our warm beds with Bible Stories For Children,there was a whole world just beyond that was never spoken of,even when we were older and had begun to ask questions.
Anna English,like her sister lived at Dead Creek,just across the road from Aunt Ruby and next door to my grandparents.They were,as far as I know farmers and lumbermen,just like my grandfather,and it had to have been a hard place to live.
My memory of Anna English is of a kindly old lady,tiny in fact,when I last saw her in the late 1980'sShe seemed to get smaller with age,as people do,though,at a subconscious level it evokes thoughts of consumption.Still,she was not exactly frail,despite a slight stoop and a crooked finger on one of her hands.Anna loved children of all kinds,though I believe she was childless.I loved being around her and her home.She was married to Fred English for more than sixty years.Fred was a very old man,even when we were small.Sometime in the 1960's they moved into the nearby Village of Canterbury,where they lived just over the crest of a hill going out of town toward Skiff Lake.That was at or near a time when most of my mother's family were moving from Dead Creek.Some moved a few miles into town,while others moved farther away.
Of course the reason for Anna English being in the sanatorium was that she had contracted Tuberculosis.This is something that I can only conceive of in my mind,as to what it must have been like.Dead Creek is almost two hundred miles from River Glade,so her separation from her husband would have been protracted with very few visits.It could not have been easy to manage a farm without the help of a wife either,so I wonder if this is the reason they moved.Tuberculosis must have had very disruptive effects on people,and it was still a feared thing in 1964.People still worried about contracting it.And it must have been very hard on the body too,though neither she,nor anyone else I knew ever mentioned it.I also got the sense of sanatoriums being rather like leper colonies,though that may not have been the intent.There seems to me to have been at least some sense of stigma about them,as they tended to be located in remote places,far from the rest of society,not unlike prisons,insane asylums or institutions for disabled persons.Their disappearance also seemed to correspond to the move to deinstitutionalize insane and disabled persons,though it may have had more to do with the decline of tuberculosis than with more progressive attitudes about institutions in general.For Anna English and her family,including my mother,it must have been a very difficult time.
Once or twice I recall being outside the sanatorium with my mother and grandmother.We were very small.The building was very imposing,but rather more like a house than a hospital.A very large house though.There were a lot of pipes sticking out of the building,pipes that didn't belong on a normal house,and there was a kind of smoke stack,or incinerator,perhaps too.In an upper floor window,near the corner of the building a woman would appear,and we would wave to her,having no idea of why we were leaving her at this building.At the time ,my focus was on the building,and I don't recall much about it's surroundings.Later,though we stopped near the building,by then closed,for a picnic.At that time I was impressed by it's seeming smallness.Nearby a small stream flowed by,through a grove of old trees,and I though what a bucolic,pastoral setting this was,as we sat there eating sandwiches and sipping Cokes.
Meanwhile,at home,we must have been exposed to the possibility of tuberculosis as well.My mother must have had some degree of risk at work,as well as from the times she visited her aunt at the sanatorium.Later,I remember we all had skin tests and chest x-rays,though nothing ever came of it.And still nobody ever talked of these things.
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