Geographies of hope: mining the frontiers of health in Denver and beyond, 1870-1965

Across the western landscape of the United States, health was a natural resource, mined and sold by late-nineteenth and twentieth-century town boosters and physicians to those afflicted with chronic pulmonary illnesses such as tuberculosis and asthma. Regional economies of health were built upon climate and sunshine. After the Second World War, children, rather than nature, increasingly became a vital resource upon which institutions such as Denver's Jewish National Home for Asthmatic Children expanded the economic networks through which capital and drugs flowed. Despite these changes, the material traces of past landscapes lingered and resurfaced in the reconfigured places where hope dwelled.