Before visitors began flocking to Asheville for craft beer and mountain views, they came because they were dying of a disease with no cure.
Starting in the late 19th century, thousands traveled to the mountains drawn by the belief that air and altitude could soothe a rattling cough. Soon enough, Asheville became one of the country’s most concentrated centers of tuberculosis care, with dozens of sanatoria dedicated to treating the so-called “White Plague.”
That history is the focus of “Asheville, North Carolina: The Origin of the American Tuberculosis Sanitarium Movement,” an article published last December in the Annals of Internal Medicine by David O. Freedman, an Asheville resident and professor emeritus of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham…