Framed or unframed, desk size to sofa size, printed by us in Arizona and Alabama since 2007. Explore now.
Shorpy is funded by you. Patreon contributors get an ad-free experience.
Learn more.
January 11, 1941. "Triboro Hospital for Tuberculosis, Parsons Boulevard, Jamaica, Queens, New York. X-Ray viewing room. Eggers & Higgins, architect." Large-format acetate negative by Gottscho-Schleisner. View full size.
Unless some of these patients had dextrocardia, the first and third images from the top left are placed into the viewing box backwards...(common error on TV shows)
Tuberculosis was common enough, and still deadly enough, during the 1940s to warrant such hospitals. These look like acute cases although the photo isn't good enough to allow much more interpretation than that. Common treatment back then, besides geographic locale and rest, might have included various kinds of radical thoracic surgeries to collapse the infected lung, but with the development of antibiotics before and after the war, those procedures gradually disappeared.
Today, drug-resistant strains of the bug are becoming frighteningly common.
On Shorpy:
Today’s Top 5