Cave Creek Museum: TB, Consumption, and the White Death

When Carol and I are in town, it is not at all unusual to find us out and about “roaming” in our own hometown.

I have been listening to the audiobook Ancient Civilizations of North America on Audible lately.  While listening, it is not uncommon for me to follow along with Google searches as Dr. Edwin Barnhart is describing the various ancient civilization found in archaeology sites around our country.

As I was poking around, I found myself on the website for the Cave Creek Museum which is just a few miles up the road from our home.  So, after church on Sunday, we found ourselves in Cave Creek exploring this museum.

This small-town museum has an eclectic mix of archaeology, the history of local mining, information on local ranches from a bygone era, the Historic First Church of Cave Creek, and a “Tubercular Cabin”.

I remember watching cowboy movies as a child and I recall quite a number of characters coughing up blood and dying of something called consumption.

As I learned on Sunday, consumption is actually tuberculosis (sometimes called the white death) and was responsible for a great many deaths over the centuries until a cure was found in the 1950s.

One article I read stated that there hardly existed a family that wasn’t touched by tuberculosis in the early 1920s.  And, tuberculosis had been a worldwide problem with even 5,000-year-old mummies found with tubercular lesions on their bones.  The painting above by Christóbal Rojas Poleo (1886) depicts a dejected husband alongside his dead wife recently succumbed to TB.

Evidently, prior to the cure, the common practice was to isolate people in sanitoriums to allow them bedrest and to prevent them from spreading the contagious disease to others. Well, it seems that Cave Creek (because of its arride climate) was a popular place for people with tuberculosis to recuperate.  And, further still, the Cave Creek Museum has Arizona’s last remaining Tubercular Cabin.

Note: click the photo below for a larger, more readable version.

Well, thanks to my visit to the Cave Creek Museum, I now understand quite a bit more about that scar on my left arm from a TB shot I received when I was a child.

While there is a great more to see at this small museum, understanding why all of those cowboys died in the movies is what seemed to stick out for me the most.  Although, I do plan to do a little more research about the projectile points from the Archaic Period, which is what brought me to this museum in the first place. 🙂
 
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