Open Window: The Lake Julia TB Sanatorium
In the early years of TB sanatoriums, mothers, fathers, children, and grandparents … both the young and the old, the rich and the poor … went away to recover at hospitals ... sometimes for years.

Because fresh air was believed to cure TB, patients slept by open windows, even in winter, sometimes waking to snow and ice on their thick covering of blankets, frozen water in their glasses, and frozen urine in their pots.

Today, while tuberculosis casts its sinister shadow back to earlier times by reemerging in new, drug-resistant forms and infecting one-fourth of the world’s population, Open Window takes you inside the Lake Julia Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Northern Minnesota where the author’s family once lived and worked—a place where a community was created and bound together by a bacterium called the tubercle bacillus.

This collective biography introduces you to the community made up of:
• The determined Dr. Mary Ghostley, who, in the early 1900s, some called a witch for studying medicine
• Dedicated employees like the author’s parents who met and fell in love at the San
•Courageous nurses like Thora Bakken and Wilma Watts, who risked their own health to help others
• Patients, like valedictorian-hopeful Art Holmstrom, who worked hard at doing nothing, hoping their treatment would allow them to return home rather than leaving in a wooden box.
 
Paperback
283 Pages
Author: Pat Nelson
Published: Independently published; Illustrated Edition (March 20, 2020)
Signed Edition