Conclusion

Abstract The legacies of European health resorts and nineteenth-century institutions for the tubercular continued well into the twentieth century. The conclusion explores some of these legacies for post-war English writers, such as John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe, and also for the literary theorist Roland Barthes, who spent the years of the Second World War in sanatoria for university students, first in the French Alps, and then in Leysin, Switzerland. His ‘Sketch of a Sanatorium Society’ and associated writings on sanatorium life, including studies of The Magic Mountain, offer a sharply analytical account, from the ethnographic perspective of a patient, of the ways in which these institutions structured both physical and emotional life. With the development of streptomycin and other chemical cures over the last century, medicine has made huge strides, but there are also losses. Although medical climatology was flawed in many ways, in its focus on preventive medicine and its understanding of the close interdependency of individual health and physical environment, it offers new perspectives for thinking about the environmental challenges facing us in our own time.