A Lifelong Fight Against Consumption

For those stricken with tuberculosis, his name was a bridge of hope, a way back not only to health, but also to life itself.

A soldier of sorts, Dr. Walter Jarvis Barlow came West shortly before the turn of the century, armed with determination to cure himself of what was then the world’s most deadly infectious disease and to help others waging a fight against the scourge then known as consumption.

Over the next half-century, Barlow built a hospital for the very poor--Barlow Sanatorium, tucked into Chavez Ravine--and one for the very rich--Las Encinas in Pasadena. He also cared personally for a select group of patients at his Villa del Sol d’Oro in Sierra Madre.

It was a time when tuberculosis was the nation’s leading cause of death and when the best medical advice was to get plenty of sunshine, a good diet and rest.

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Born in New York in 1868, Barlow earned his medical degree from Columbia University in 1892. But shortly after hanging out his shingle, he contracted tuberculosis, then known as “the white plague.” As his strength declined, he headed West to a warmer climate.

He arrived in Los Angeles in 1897, and the voracious reading he did while regaining his health narrowed into an obsessive focus on tuberculosis.

As his health improved, he opened a medical office downtown, where he privately treated many patients with TB. They in turn donated sizable amounts to their physician’s personal project: construction of a sanitarium.

The next year, Barlow married Marion Patterson Brooks, the heiress to a locomotive manufacturing fortune. Her mother came along in the bargain.

Honeymooning in the San Jacinto Mountains--mother-in-law left behind at home--soon led the Barlows to build a getaway cabin near Idyllwild.

The only doctor in the mountains, Barlow treated the locals, including a severely injured man who was dragged along a fence by a wild horse. After dealing with the man’s injuries as best they could, Marion held the man’s head while Barlow drove him in a horse-pulled wagon 19 miles down the bumpy road to a hospital. The man survived.

Barlow’s dream for a Los Angeles sanitarium became a reality after several landmark fund-raisers at his family home on Figueroa Street in the Adams district. Huge donations rolled in from wealthy individuals whose lives, like those of so many of that era’s poor, had been touched by tuberculosis.

In 1902, Barlow Sanatorium--a colony of secluded bungalows-- opened with two patients and without city or county funding. It quickly became the city’s first large-scale treatment facility devoted solely to consumptives.

Strict rules were enforced at the 25-acre sanitarium in the former Rock Quarry Hills: no spitting on the grounds because the sputum might contain the TB bacterium. Cloths to be used as handkerchiefs were provided and burned each morning and night. Lights out at 9 p.m. and a cold plunge every morning, with hot baths on Tuesday and Saturday.

A savvy and determined fund-raiser, Barlow asked the city of Los Angeles for help. The city sent a chain gang, whose members cleared the roads and graded the landscape. The Los Angeles Optimist Club would soon build a library, complete with an “angel of a librarian.”

Barlow’s love of books led to the opening of yet another library--Barlow Medical Library--at 742 N. Broadway in Los Angeles. In 1934, his extensive rare book collection would be donated to the Los Angeles County Medical Assn., which later gave it to the Huntington Library.

Though often a sickness of the poor, TB--spread through the air--could also afflict the very rich.

In 1904, Barlow and four other physicians--with combined capital of $27,000--incorporated and built the Southern California Sanatorium for Nervous Disease in Pasadena. With a dual goal in mind, they also treated long-term TB patients.

But “Nervous Disease” seemed to make a few people uncomfortable, and Barlow and his colleagues changed the name to Las Encinas for the oak trees on the 29 sprawling acres of arboretum.

The group adopted a motto--”Not just to live but to enjoy living”--and inscribed it in Latin over the entryway of the Tudor-style mansion near San Gabriel and Del Mar boulevards.

Comedian W.C. Fields, a notorious tippler, would later stay periodically at Las Encinas to dry out, along with other celebrities.

In 1924, after a trip to Italy, the Barlows commissioned architect Wallace Neff to create a two-thirds scale replica of the Michelangelo-designed Florentine Villa Collazzi on their 13-acre ranch at Highland and Michillinda avenues in Sierra Madre.

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Neff’s copy was replete with a tower and an arcaded courtyard overlooked by colonnaded porches. Included in the design was a hand-carved caduceus--the serpent-and-staff symbol of the medical profession--over the mantel and three vaults in the basement: one for jewels and other valuables, one for medicine, and one a wine cellar hidden behind a vault door, the perfect Prohibition hideaway.

Barlow’s passion for canines, books and medicine came to end in 1937 when he died at his famed showplace villa.

His beloved home was the site of many fund-raising balls and a place where his six dogs and grandchildren roamed freely. It was sold for $28,500 in 1942 to the Sisters of St. Francis, who later turned it into Alverno High School.

Before Marion Barlow died in 1964, after living out her years on the grounds of the old Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, the sanitarium began to fade. Medical science gained the upper hand in the fight against TB, rendering the Barlow approach of sunshine and rest passe.

As the cottages drifted into a quaint backdrop, the sanitarium became Barlow Respiratory Hospital and added buildings, including a small acute-care facility. It also expanded its focus to lung disorders of various kinds. For a time, part of the facility was used as an AIDS hospice.

Thus, despite the changes wrought by the unfolding 20th century, the institutions Barlow founded in Chavez Ravine and at Las Encinas have never lost sight of their mission of health.

Cecilia Rasmussen’s new book, “L.A. Unconventional,” a collection of stories about Los Angeles’ unique and offbeat characters, is available at most bookstores or can be ordered by calling (800) 246-4042. The special price of $30.95 includes shipping and sales tax.