There is a remarkable old fort near Silver City, NM, called Fort Bayard. Originally I was drawn there because of the fine old buildings. Think of all the wealth/debt sunk into McMansions during the late housing bubble. How many got grand porches like these? It's something that civilization has lost, apparently. These buildings were officers' housing.


The old fort had many missions. Originally it was for fighting Apaches. It had served as a POW camp for Germans during WWII. Today there is a state mental hospital there. But mainly it was a sanitarium for tuberculosis.

Since tuberculosis was less prevalent in sunny, dry climates, medical thinking of the times took this correlation and tried to reach for a cure. Patients would sit on a sunny roof and hold mirrors that reflected the New Mexican sun into their throats. Don't laugh at their naivety. Correlations have often been confused with cause-and-effect. They still are.

I hardly ever go on guided tours, but I took this one in order to see inside these houses. Alas they were distressingly modern inside since they had been occupied until just a few years ago. But everybody on the tour loved the old bath tub.




Although the bacillus that causes the disease was known when Fort Bayard's sanitarium was built, no real cure existed until the antibiotic, streptomycin, was developed at the end of WWII.

Until then what could people do but try things that seemed to help or made sense to them. Where did all these ideas come from: psychology, religion, hearsay? The more I thought about this groping for a treatment, the more Fort Bayard seemed permeated by a sad and noble beauty.

Years ago I discovered that history could be more interesting if I emphasized the history of religions, perhaps because it made it easier to connect with the zeitgeist of an era. The conclusion of a classic book about Greek religion by Gilbert Murray seems to apply to this groping for a cure of tuberculosis.

"The Uncharted surrounds us on every side and we must needs have some relation towards it...As far as knowledge and conscious reason will go, we should resolutely follow their austere guidance. But when they cease, as cease they must, we must use as best we can those fainter powers of apprehension and surmise and sensitiveness by which, after all, most high truth has been reached as well as most high art and poetry...

...and remembering  above all to walk gently in a world where the lights are dim and the very stars wander.