Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative

The history of medicine is much more than the story of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Seeking to understand the patient’s perspective, historians scour the archives, searching for rare personal accounts. Bringing together a trove of more than 400 family letters by Charles Dwight Willard,
Suffering in the Land of Sunshine
provides a unique window into the experience of sickness. A Los Angeles civic leader at the turn of the twentieth century, Willard is well known to historians of the West, but exclusively for his public life as a booster and reformer. Completely ignored is his thirty-year struggle with tuberculosis, the most fearsome disease of his time. Emily K. Abel explores the contradictions between the ideology he espoused and the illness he lived. Like many Anglo Saxons in Los Angeles, Willard was proud of his genetic heritage and often associated tuberculosis with tramps and Mexicans. He also became one of the city’s foremost promoters, seeking to lure white-middle class invalids with the promise of miraculous cures. As his own symptoms worsened, however, he found it increasingly difficult to distinguish himself from the groups that he disparaged. Willard’s evocative story offers fresh insights into several critical issues, including how concepts of gender, class, and race shape patients’ representations of their illness, how expectations of cure affect the illness experience, how different cultures constrain the coping strategies of the sick, and why robust health is such an exalted value in certain societies.