Failure of Healing
In the early 20th century, tuberculosis killed around one-third of the people it infected without treatment within the year; however, treatment, high living standards, and adequate food greatly increased the likelihood of survival past one year (Ritchie and Spooner). Those of lower socioeconomic status who did not have access would have had higher mortality raters, making up a large portion of the 3 million Americans who died from tuberculosis between 1900 and 1940. Often, those in charge of public hospitals wanted the bodies “disposed of at a minimum cost to the county” because they were seen as insignificant members of society (“The Doctor” 230). The mass infection rate and high mortality of tuberculosis revealed stark issues of social class, raising a basic and darker question: who received a proper burial?
Since tuberculosis impacted poor people the most, many were buried in Potter’s Fields—a generic term describing communal burial sites of unknown, unclaimed, or impoverished people. New York’s largest mass gravesite was located on Hart Island, in Long Island Sound. It was first used as a mass cemetery during the Civil War, and after that quickly became a burial ground for New York's indigent, as well as a quarantine area during times of pandemic. It housed a psychiatric hospital, a boy's workhouse, a prison, and a tubercularium beginning in the 1880s...anyone who troubled the city with their visibility. A single page from its records in July of 1935 shows four individuals buried in Trench #66 listed with “TB” as their cause of death. At about this time an FAP lithographer named David Burke created a print titled He Calleth His Own by Name—Potter’s Field. Workers in the background, presumably digging trenches, are overshadowed by the bleak vista of a dead tree, numbered gravestones, and a large cross. Burke’s title alludes to a passage in John 10:3 that harshly judges the treatment of poor people in human societies, compared to the justice they deserve.
Some sanatoriums had designated cemeteries, while others, like the Mount Morris Tuberculosis Hospital, did not. Despite such differences, there still would have been a disparity between those transported to their hometowns to be buried and those buried in Mount Morris because that was closest. Livingston County Cemetery Records reflect that many victims of tuberculosis were buried in the town cemetery before the hospital was established; their fate during the 1930s-70s is less clear.
Works Consulted
-- The Hart Island Project Link
-- Kim, Peter S., and Soumya Swaminathan. “Ending TB: The World's Oldest Pandemic. Journal of the International AIDS Society 24.3 (2021): e25698.
-- Ritchie, Hannah, and Fiona Spooner. “Once a Leading Killer, Tuberculosis is Now Rare in Rich Countries — Here’s How it Happened.” OurWorldinData. 2025. Link
-- “The Doctor a Dud?” Editorial. Delaware State Medical Journal (Nov. 1941): 229-230. Link