Thomas C. McRae Sanatorium - Arkansas' First Treatment Facility for Black Victims of Tuberculosis

Arkansas’ history tells of many practices used to uphold racial segregation in public facilities. Medical facilities were no exception to this neglectful discrimination. Depending on the town, Black medical facilities were not created with the same quality, accessibility, or efficiency compared to those created for white people – if they were created at all.

As tuberculosis spread throughout the United States towards the end of the 19th century, hundreds contracted or died from the disease daily. It was the second-leading cause of death in America, with a rate three times higher among Black people than white people. Similar stats posed true for Arkansas because its medical facilities were segregated, with only a few resources available to care for Black Arkansans.

The void of medical resources to Black tuberculosis victims was significantly due to a racially discriminatory theory that the biology of Black people made them more susceptible to contracting and inevitably dying from the disease. However, as the disease spread, white communities grew concerned for their health, being that many Black people worked in white communities. As the concern grew, decision-makers created measures to combat the disease in the form of segregated sanatoriums.

BLACK BIOLOGY

Dr. Edward Osgood Otis, a leading national authority on tuberculosis(1), believed the disease did not afflict all races the same. He argued that Black people contracted and died from tuberculosis at a higher rate because they weren’t slaves anymore. He believed “the colored race in the United States has at the present time at least four times mortality as the white race, whereas before the Civil War the disease was rare among the colored population” (Otis 19). In his opinion, because Black people were living as free citizens in a modern and civilized society, this made them more prone to contract tuberculosis. He believed that if Black people were still slaves, their consumption rate would not be so high.

It was a standard medical practice to perceive the body of a Black person as less developed and inherently degenerative than that of a white person. Many white physicians believed Black people’s biology – the size of the chest and the broadness of nostrils, for example – were defects and made them more vulnerable to contracting and dying from tuberculosis than white people.

These theories, and others like them, permeated the medical disposition of the South and affected how white physicians treated Black patients. Often time, white physicians blamed their racial irresponsibility on the biological design of Black people. Black cases of tuberculosis were often automatically given a prognosis of death with no attempt to offer aid. It was the blanketed opinion of many policymakers that it would be wasteful to create financial, medical, and educational resources for Black people with tuberculosis because they were unavoidably going to die from the disease anyway. The opinion of wasted resources also affected the urgency to create healthcare facilities.

Many of these opinions and theories were manipulative tactics for segregation and the entitlement nature of many white people to preserve Jim Crow. Nonetheless, the disease was a threat in Arkansas, so legislatures positioned the state to use quarantining to combat the disease – especially in favor of protecting white communities.

SANATORIUM