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The Hendricks-Laws Sanatorium, built in 1914, was a tuberculosis hospital under the supervision of two El Paso physicians, Charles M. Hendricks and James Laws. At the time, many doctors believed that most lung diseases could be treated successfully in a high, dry and sparsely vegetated climate. El Paso, a railway hub next to the Franklin Mountains, was one of several cities in the American West that became major tuberculosis-treatment centers, attracting patients from across the United States. The Hendricks-Laws Sanatorium housed El Paso’s only bilateral artificial pneumothorax device, a machine that collapsed a patient’s lung, allowing it to rest and recuperate. Sanatoriums declined in popularity during the 1930s as doctors began to treat tuberculosis patients locally and disappeared entirely when effective antibiotics became available the following decade. The Hendricks-Laws Sanatorium closed in 1940. During and after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), El Paso became home to thousands of Mexican refugees fleeing political and religious persecution. Among those refugees were the Franciscan priests of the province of the Holy Gospel, who left Mexico City and moved to El Paso to train catholic priests and to serve the city’s growing Hispanic population. The Franciscan order purchased the former sanatorium and transformed it into the Roger Bacon Franciscan Seminary. For more than seven decades, the seminary has educated young men for the priesthood. |
