The sanatorium became a fixture in the U.S. As Sheila Rothman writes in Living in the Shadow of Death, “By 1900, 34 sanatoriums with 4,485 beds had been opened in the United States. Twenty-five years later, there were 536 sanatoriums with 673,338 beds.” At the height of the sanatorium, there were nearly as many beds to treat tuberculosis patients as there were hospital beds for all other illnesses combined.
