A White Wind Blew

I seem to be reading a lot about late 19th/early 20th century disease lately. There's yellow fever, typhoid fever, and now, at the heart of James Markert's A White Wind Blew, tuberculosis. More specifically, this is the story of life and death in that most dreaded of institutions, the sanatorium. I have been fascinated by the idea of tuberculosis sanatoria since I was a little kid visiting Mammoth Cave for the first time and - right there in the pitch black, damp interior - the National Parks guide spun the tale of the consumptives sent underground to improve their chances against TB. (The NPS website tells the full story.) But I digress.

A White Wind Blew is the story of a Louisville sanatorium, the patients who live there, and the doctors who tend them told through the lens of Prohibition and Jim Crow laws. The Klan has begun to rear its head, angered by both the quantities of sacramental wine procured by and for the quasi-clergy as well as the treatment of black patients, treatment which the Klan perceives to be too good in some cases. Set in the late '20s, there are also veterans of the first World War struggling to cope with both the ravages of war and the knowledge that they survived the carnage of the Western Front only to be struck by the White Wind itself.

And then there is our protagonist, Dr. Wolfgang Pike, a man whom many patients call Father, but who has abandoned the seminary once for the love of a woman and is considering doing so again. More than woman, wine, or holiness, though, he loves his music. Dr. Pike determines to form an orchestra comprised of TB patients, an unlikely scenario perhaps, but one which Markert is able to imbue with authenticity - and unexpected outcomes. A White Wind Blew is a much lighter read that its topic would suggest. This is not a book about TB (for that, I recommend selected chapters of Farewell to the East End), but about living with TB in one of the most isolating places man hath ever created - but even then, it was not without hope.