Sanatoriums

What ever happened to sanatoriums?

Have they been replaced by rehab clinics and spas?

I would like to know if there are still places for the simply infirm, of moderate income. In Arizona, maybe. Cheap labor and a dry climate would make such a place possible there. Nationalized health care could recall the word 'sanatorium' into common use. The times being what they are, people might even use slang to refer to them. "I've been feeling burned out so I spent a long weekend at the sana'." The first 'a' would be softened in abbreviation, as in 'saw'. Owing to the similar contexts, friends might be confused, especially if the cell phone reception was spotty. "You spent a weekend in a sauna? What?" People from the North Atlantic region of the US would make it sound like 'santa'. Imagining it, I hear half-Dominican young women intoning the word. "Didjew hear about that new Santa in Worcester (read: Woostah)?"The New York Times Magazine would devote a full issue to the best and brightest among them. Zoloft, the modern man's Ether, may have made the need for such places redundant. But their usefulness, at least in literature, extends beyond the calmative, the curative. Doesn't Vronsky return from the sanatorium he was sent to after his horseracing accident more heroic than before? Or was the opposite the case? Is it only after his return that the affair with Anna K. turns sour and perverse? Was it used as a thematic turning point in the story?

Brandon's post about the Russians got me thinking about sanatoriums. They're a kind of part-time Elysium in these books, and Chekhov writes some about them too, if I'm remembering correctly. In which case, I'd like to read a history of Slavic literature tracking the motifs: extraction to a sanatorium, export to a gulag.

I can't think of an analogue in Latin American literature, where most of my own attention is focused, except in AIDS literature. In this, though, the effect is ironic. It is strange, thinking it over now, that there is not a tradition of sanatorium visiting in Latin American literature and culture. The politics alone, with its tendency toward decadence, neglect and repression, would make sanatoriums useful, at least to the educated class, doctors, lawyers and so on, both as a means of recovery for the individual, and for silencing, on the part of the state.