A Life Consumed: Lilly Samson's Dispatches from the TB Front

by Diane Sims

In 1923 Lilly Samson, a teacher in a one-room school in Goulais River north of Sault Ste Marie, contracted TB. She was 22 years old and engaged to be married. A year later she entered a sanatorium in Gravenhurst, Ontario. She died there in 1927. Before she did, though, she wrote a series of letters that her niece Diane Sims has made the centrepiece of a remarkably moving and thought provoking look at TB in Canada in the 20s, a time when receiving a diagnosis of TB, according to Susan Sontag, was like learning you have cancer today. In a combination of discursive prose, fictional recreation, forensic fact-finding and historical commentary, Sims arrays a variety of constellations around Lilly's letters. There is the national, where the 22 sanatoria across the country embraced all classes of Canadians, including Mackenzie King's brother Douglas who compared fighting TB to surviving on the front lines. There is the medical/political, where provision of TB care for all its citizens was Saskatchewan's precursor to medicare. There is the social, where Lilly gets to know Dr. Norman Bethune, himself a patient at the Gravenhurst sanatorium, their isolated community within a community. There is the personal, where Lilly, by turns hopeful and deeply angry at this theft of her life, enters into a relationship with another patient.

170 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

Reviews

[Pam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was curious to read this as I live in Gravenhurst where the San is located.
This gave good insight to the treatment and the lives of patients in the 1920s. Tragic disease that shows no mercy.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enlightening insofar as to what impact TB had on the Canadian communities nationwide in the 1920s and before, as there are references to famous people who were also struck down by consumption, such as Robert Louis Stevenson.
It's also a very good snapshot of healthcare and society in general at that time. What struck me as particularly surprising was how many visitors she had on a regular basis.... it seems that people in that age were more willing to visit the ill. Perhaps this had to do with the general ignorance of how TB was transmitted; it may also have something to do with the societal culture of the time.
The health of a people - whether during a certain period or a certain place - often goes unmentioned, yet it is an important facet of understanding the issues and conditions that shaped their reality. I find that for myself, reading about health in history adds a grounding sense of understanding to a period or culture that I lacked before.
The format was experimental, in that it mixed letters from and to Lily Samson with narration by Sims, her great-niece, that fleshed out the surrounding family and circumstances. I think that it worked well. I will say that this is not an action-packed story; it is more of a reflective tale of a tragedy that occurred to far too many families at the time. The sense is that Lily Samson's account of her life is only one tiny fragment of the entire whole of the suffering that TB has caused, and in this way, the story had an impact larger than itself.
It's a very sad story, but that's the point; TB may have been reduced in this country, but it is far from gone. I consider myself privileged to have been ignorant of its devastating effects for so long... and shocked that millions a year still die from this disease.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading "Moloka'i" and what life was like for people with leprosy, made me start thinking of the time my maternal grandmother spent in a "San" with TB and how she coped thru writing in journals, and how her family coped thru those tough years. This book made life in the San come to life and gave me a richer picture of what it might have been like for my "Grandma B." I've been lucky enough to read some of her journal entries and this book definitely added more depth to it for me.

[Gabriele Wills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Diane Sims skillfully weaves an engrossing and moving narrative around letters sent by her aunt, who was "chasing the cure" in a TB sanatorium, to reveal what life was like for those dealing with this insidious disease.

[Theresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because my husband's mother died of TB in the early 1940s in a sanitorium, just wanted to know more of what her last years might have been. "A Life Consumed" chronicles one young woman's journey with this then sometimes fatal disease. Sad but worth reading.

[Kari Squarzolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could not put this book down. What a wonderful job done telling the sad story of an ancestor through her letters home. It helped me to visualize what two of my ancestors might have experienced at the Muskoka Sanatarium before succumbing to TB.