Original Friendship Album of a Pennsylvania Tuberculosis Sanitorium Patient

Hamburg, PA, 1933. Very Good. Hamburg, PA: 1933. Small oblong octavo photo album (14.5x20.5cm); string-bound stiff brown pictorial card wrappers printed in gilt; [36]pp. stiff black leaves filled to completion with halftone photographs, four silver gelatin photographic snapshots, collages, and well wishes written in white pencil. Moderate wear to wrapper margins, notably at spine ends, corners a bit bumped, leaves have a rather smokey odor, else a Very Good example, contents still clean and sound.

Quite a bittersweet keepsake belonging to twenty-year-old Harvey Troutman (1913-1934) while a patient at the Hamburg Tuberculosis Sanitorium in Berks County (referred to here simply as "Berks San."). In the first few leaves Troutman filled the pages with cut-out halftone portraits of members of the Sanitorium staff including nurses and doctors, though the majority of the volume is filled with messages from his friends and fellow patients dated between April and May, 1933.

While some are ardently sincere or religious in tenor, others add a little levity to a terrible affliction: "I'll remember you (when I'm rich"); "Many happy returns of the day. When you get out of this Spit Factory watch your step." Grace W. went so far as to collage cut-out pieces of advice to follow: "Rest," "Sunshine stamps out T.B.", "Weight Increase," "Hello Fatty" ("Ha! Ha!" she has added in manuscript).

Sadly, Harvey passed away a year later, on May 5, 1934, at the age of twenty-one.