When Fears of Tuberculosis Drove an Open-Air School Movement

Intended to curb the spread of tuberculosis, open-air schools grew

As the 20th century dawned, tuberculosis—otherwise known as consumption, “white plague” or “white death”—had become the leading cause of death in the United States. The dreaded lung disease killed an estimated 450 Americans a day, most of them between the ages of 15 and 44.

At the time, tuberculosis was associated with dirty, unhygienic living conditions, which were common for the workers who had packed into the cities of Europe and the United States since the Industrial Revolution. With no effective medicine available (yet), the preferred treatment was the open-air cure, or exposing patients to as much fresh air and sunlight as possible. This led to the proliferation of tuberculosis sanitariums, ranging from luxe spa-like resorts to government-run institutions across Europe and the United States.

Though many of its victims were poor city dwellers, no one was immune to tuberculosis—especially not children. In fact, doctors and educators believed that the crowded classrooms and lack of fresh air in many schools helped spread the disease. To keep kids healthy, they decided to take school outside...

...The open-air school movement arrived in the United States in 1908, thanks to two doctors from Rhode Island. Mary Packard and Ellen Stone were among the first female graduates of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and had helped found Providence’s League for the Suppression of Tuberculosis. After running a summer day camp for tubercular children, they thought they would try the fresh-air method on a larger scale during the school year.

The Providence school board authorized the use of an empty brick schoolhouse building, where a second-floor classroom was remodeled to have floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, which could be opened with a hinge and kept open to the air.

As Mary Korr wrote in the Rhode Island Medical Journal in 2016, the students in the Providence open-air school were children who had been exposed to tuberculosis but weren’t actively sick. Over that first cold New England winter, the children snuggled in wearable blankets known as “Eskimo sitting bags” and placed heated soapstones at their feet. A fire in a cylinder stove helped blunt the chill, but the classroom never reached more than 10 degrees above what it was outside.

https://www.history.com/news/school-outside-tuberculosis