Brian Cray Knihy

America in the early 1800s and 1900s experienced much hardship from airborne pathogens and communicable diseases due to its fledgling advancements in proper hygiene and sanitary conditions. As cities became breeding grounds for disease, one such contagion ravaged the world, consuming hundreds of thousands of people each year in America. As physicians searched diligently for a cure, where did the infected souls dying of an incurable, terminal illness go? What therapies were used to mitigate their pain, reduce the boiling lesions plaguing their skin, and soothe the deformities bulging their joints and bones? As you wander through the pages of this book, creeping between the chapters and photos of decay, you will experience an institute that burgeoned with the sun. You will feel its heartbeat resonate within its blood-red, crumbling walls, as nature guides you through its derelict buildings and distressed corridors. You will cast your eyes out among the enchanted hills of a small town, learn its history and hear its stories. This is the story of the J.N. Adam Memorial Hospital in Perrysburg, New York.

Have you ever wondered what the inside of a derelict sanatorium looks like? Have you ever had the urge to explore inside the distressed walls, to close your eyes and imagine its past? You are not alone. Abandoned sanatoriums plague the USA as badly as communicable diseases once did, eradicating people by the hundreds of thousands in the early 1900s.Imagine a Victorian castle soaring to the heavens with wrought-iron balconies and crumbling bricks bleeding bright red. As it slowly vanishes from Mother Nature's intoxicating grip, not even time can destroy its story. Within its dying walls, you'll feel a family that once embraced its patients by water cure practices under the sixty-six-year Jackson reign. You'll hear the lion's roar preaching, "Weakness is a crime" as Bernarr Macfadden boasts exercise, fasting on the verge of starvation and healthy diet. His eccentricities made him the pioneer of physical culture and a publishing god, as one of the first men to distribute risqué material with lewd cosmographs. This is the sanatorium's story as the abandoned "Castle on the Hill" in Dansville, New York.