Project 49: Portraits from the Seward Sanatorium, 1950–1953

Project 49 is a monthly series from the University of Alaska Anchorage, highlighting characters and events from Alaska's rich history that have been preserved in our archives.

Born in Fairbanks in 1932 with a heart defect that weakened him and left him susceptible to Alaska's 1940s tuberculosis epidemic, Henry S. Kaiser Jr. was luckier than he sounds.

He considered himself fortunate to contract the TB that sent him to the Seward Sanatorium* for three years shortly after he graduated from high school. He used those years in the treatment facility, run by the Women's Division of Christian Service of the Methodist Church, to rest his hard-working heart, heal his lungs and bide his time awaiting the medical advances in heart surgery that would give him the chance to lead a normal life.

"I had a world of faith in the future," he wrote in a memoir piece, part of the Henry S. Kaiser Jr. collection in the UAA/APU Consortium Library Archives & Special Collections.

While at the sanatorium, he got to know his fellow residents-men, women and children from towns and villages throughout Alaska-and amassed a compelling collection of patient and medical staff portraits. They showcase the warmth his subjects had for their photographer. Far from being bleak hospital photos, it's a collection of beaming smiles and near-laughter, each slide carefully noted by Kaiser with his subject's name, a hometown and whatever other details he could fit in the cramped margins of a Kodachrome slide.

The kind of guy who would hitchhike to heart surgery

In 1949, Kaiser enrolled in the University of Alaska, but after just one semester, he had to withdraw and seek treatment for tuberculosis.

"This should have left me extremely disappointed, but I remember what the late William Bolitho, author of Twelve Against the Gods, said, 'The most important thing in life is not to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The really important thing is to profit from your losses," Kaiser wrote in his undated personal essay titled, "I Hitchhiked to Heart Surgery." (Based on references in Kaiser's essay, it was most likely written in the late 1950s.)

The Kaiser collection is one of the smaller archive collections, containing just a few folders of slides and photographs in addition to the 10-page, typewritten essay that tells the story of a plucky young man of faith who embraced science. He first learned about important developments in heart surgery from a 1945 TIME magazine article when he was in the 8th grade, he wrote in his personal essay. The essay also provides context for his sanatorium photographs and details his determination to live a full life. As the title suggests, it tells the story of Kaiser, newly recovered from TB, hitchhiking from Fairbanks to Rochester, Minn., to visit the famed Mayo Clinic he'd read so much about in his research on advances in heart surgery. There, he talked his way into seeing a series of doctors who admitted the 22-year-old Kaiser for heart surgery in June 1954.

Despite the fact that open heart surgery was a new procedure, Kaiser recalled that he was unafraid going into the operating room, excited even, hopeful that the surgeons could strengthen what felt like "an invisible thread of life." He awoke from the 8-hour surgery eager to know if it had worked.

"I remembered to look at my abnormally bluish-colored fingernails. If they were now pink, I would know that my operation had been a success. I looked and saw for the first time in my twenty two and one-half years of life, that my fingers were getting sufficient oxygen, and that the nails were pink! I also noticed that my chest no longer vibrated violently because of a labored heartbeat," he wrote.

Ten days later, he was released from the hospital. Feeling good, but not quite up to hitchhiking, he hopped a plane to head home to Alaska.

Kaiser lived to be 79 years old, long enough to share his stories with his grandkids and continue to take photographs that have been featured in museums and publications throughout the state. He earned a degree in elementary education from University of Alaska in 1960, worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and married his wife, Esther, who submitted the Kaiser collection to the archives upon his passing in 2011.

The entire Kaiser slide/photo collection has been digitized and can be found in Alaska's Digital Archives.

Here's a slideshow with some of the standout images. Click through to the full Flickr album (18 images) for titles and descriptions of each photograph:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/103788595@N05/sets/72157646291056224/show/

*Fans of the vampire genre should not confuse Dr. Seward's Sanatorium (aka Sanitarium), of Dracula fame, with this particular Methodist-run institution of treatment and rehabilitation for Alaskans with tuberculosis.

Written by Jamie Gonzales, UAA Office of University Advancement