My great-grandfather Fritz Morin and my grandfather Jean Morin were Swiss doctors specialized in treating tuberculosis before the era of antibiotic treatment. My great-grandfather’s oldest son Alfred contracted the lung infection which spiked his father’s interest in the disease and motivated him to relocate his whole family to a hotel in Leysin, a village in the Swiss mountains above the lake of Geneva.
High altitude clean air, sun, rest, and good nutrition offered the best chance for the tuberculosis patients’ immune system to “wall off” pockets of pulmonary tuberculosis. Wealthy citizens from all over Europe had come to Leysin for the alpine scenery and experience and rich patients were now referred to these up-and-coming sanatoria in the Swiss alps where they spent months and years until they recovered or succumbed to the disease.
Thus, initially, this form of treatment was a luxury, like a deluxe health spa, which was only accessible to the most privileged. But my great-grandfather had a social instinct, and he initiated the creation of the first popular sanatorium. He advocated with county and local governments to fund the treatment facilities and give access to tuberculosis treatment to everybody who got pulmonary Tb. Then, during World War one and two, many soldiers living in closed encampments became vulnerable to the pandemic of contagious tuberculosis, and this infectious disease became a public health and geopolitical problem. This was one of the factors that led the Swiss federal government to create government-established health insurance and social security funds which further facilitated the access to treatment.
In 1930 out of 5,698 people living in Leysin, 244 were farmers and 3,000 were TB patients from 70 different countries. One of my grandfather’s medical residents, the doctor Louis Constant Vauthier, was a follower of the internationalism movement which flourished in the wake of World War one. Internationalists believed that people should unite across national, political, cultural, racial, or class boundaries to advance their common interests and reduce conflict and war. Hence, doctor Vauthier created the unique experiment of a university TB sanatorium in Leysin that hosted sick university students and professors from all over the world. At that time, students and professors in academia were among the poorer segments of the population and getting tuberculosis meant social isolation and disenfranchisement. He brought them together in Leysin and organized subsidies for their stay and treatment. Because they had to remain in treatment for many months, doctor Vauthier saw the opportunity to create community across cultural, political and language differences and he developed programs for patients to share knowledge, art, and culture. He also thought that this form of community building would alleviate the patients’ emotional burden that came from months long family separation and suffering the toll of a terrible infectious disease. This social health experiment drew the attention of many such as Mahatma Gandhi.
My personal family history illustrates that the themes I will be expanding in my upcoming book “Communal Medicine” are preexisting. The social dimension of health, the injustice of health disparities, the importance of communal and emotional healing are topics that have pervaded across time and generations.