Patients Were Lucky to Have Olive View

* As a patient at Olive View Sanitarium, 1944-47, I found your account of it greatly at odds with my own memories (“Breathing New Life,” Oct. 28).

I never once thought of it as a “prison.” I was not “locked up.” It was a place to get well, and just as important, to protect others from infection. If it took lying on your back and never getting out of bed, so be it. Being out on the porch--unlike your account--was a choice spot. Pumping air into the chest cavity was far from horrifying; it was virtually painless.

I still have several good friends from Olive View, one of whom--a world traveler in his 70s--had several ribs removed. I remember with gratitude the caring nurses and orderlies. (I can’t say as much for the doctors. Perhaps they thought of it as a prison!) Sure, lying in bed for three years was no fun, but we are lucky we had Olive View.

It’s incongruous that so many of the complaining you quoted have survived into their 60s, 70s and even 80s. Without it they may have died young, but not before they infected their loved ones and others.

HOWARD C. LOCKWOOD

Lake View Terrace