Denver TB Course

As seems to be the trend for this year, I'm again away from DC, this time to Denver for the Denver TB Course at National Jewish Hospital. Here's a picture of the building the course is in:

This is the 49th year of the TB course at National Jewish, which established itself as a TB mecca of knowledge, so to speak, back in the days of sanitariums. What I didn't realize until the History of TB lecture today is that the practice of sanitariums started in Europe, in the Alps, around 1865. In the States, it started in the Adirondacks in 1884 with Trudeau (the great-great-grandfather of the comic strip artist, I believe), a physician in New York, who was diagnosed with TB. At the time, that was pretty much a death sentence, as they didn't yet have antibiotics to treat it. So he left his practice and went up the Adirondacks to relax, and his symptoms improved. They thought it was the elevation. Well, since the Adirondacks are pretty miserable for most of the year, and the Rockies are fairly nice, the practice of traveling to sanitariums moved from upstate New York to Colorado. More people traveled to Colorado for TB treatment than to strike it rich at the gold rush.

After our History of TB lecture, most of the lectures were introductory, covering topics such as transmission, immunology, diagnostics, and chest x-ray findings. Most of it was pretty dull, actually, although I did pick up a few pointers in the x-ray lecture. I'm hoping tomorrow will be more exciting. We'll be discussing some challenging cases that they've seen here at National Jewish, than latent TB infection (which is pretty much all preventive medicine physicians deal with, in terms of TB), and more about treatments and drugs. Should be a good time.