By February 1942, the US War Department began to officially investigate taking over the facility. James saves a few dollars for the next few years.” Despite such arguments, the building remained eerily empty for the next three years, being designated Butler’s “white elephant.”įollowing the bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was an increasing amount of talk about using the building as a soldier’s hospital. On one occasion Sipe painted a vibrant image claiming, “I can hear the clods falling on their coffins, while Mr. Hale Sipe, who repeatedly advocated for the sanitorium on the senate floor. James maintained that the existing state hospitals were enough to accommodate current tuberculosis patients and opening the sanitorium was “an unjustifiable expense.” Many Pennsylvanians took issue with this notion, including Senator C. James, decided to delay the sanitorium’s opening. Facing a deficit and budgetary restrictions the new Pennsylvania Governor, Arthur H. However, by the next year the sanitorium became a point of contention in Pennsylvania politics. Pennsylvanian public health advocates attributed many of these deaths to the four to six months it took for patients to be admitted to a state hospital.Īs a result, in May 1938, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania began construction on the Western Pennsylvania Tuberculosis Sanatorium. Despite these advances, 70,000 Americans died from the disease in 1938.

By the 1930’s, advances in medicine produced more effective treatments for tuberculous.

Tuberculosis was well known to be devastating, and often referred to as the white plague, because of the effect it had on one’s lungs. It was originally built as a 500-bed tuberculosis sanitorium. The Butler Veterans Administration Hospital was not intended to be a veteran hospital.

Butler medical center