Tuberculosis is the pinnacle disease since the dawn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century, the carnage of deaths in Portugal and World. The constant prophylaxis and treatment experimentation is the fuse creating an architecture system – the sanatorium - suffering evolution and metamorphosis trough the current social and medical program.
Although the strong experimentalisms in medicine due to medical staff, prophylaxis and treatment of tuberculosis have as big (and only) pillar: the architecture. On one hand, for control purposes, and also for the possible control of the disease and traces of curing, whose paradigms vary over more than a century.
Thus, the architecture of these buildings is no longer a “cocoon”, a hotel to be a comfort provider on his deathbed, but a place of health, environment of prosperity, a container of medical investigations which do not see the disease as an effective treatment in the short or long term: it was born a proprietary system, never before used, with technical architects, medical technologies and working with a single purpose: healing.
Although Portugal has been embryo sanatorium equipment worldwide, was also influenced at schools of architecture - and examples of what was being built in the German and French models. Over eighty sanatoriums are metamorphosing throughout his life, watching (or serving as a pillar) to the "new medicine", the ways to face the diseases, suffering transformations such as tremendous buildings, almost urban-scale-type, or even simple houses. The sanatorium is, per excellence, the system that makes the hinge between architecture to modern hospital care.
In these 100 years, the connection between medicine and architecture, nationally and internationally, will be scrutinized in this paper, focusing on mobility of medical knowledge and the doctors, the repercussions hygienist in typologies and social experiences, the importance of status and power as centers of decision, a close link architecture and architects, styles and its vicissitudes in the history of medicine and medical technology poring over a particular disease: tuberculosis.