Though notorious for its polluted air today, the city of Los Angeles once touted itself as a health resort. After the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1876, publicists launched a campaign to portray the city as the promised land, circulating countless stories of miraculous cures for the sick and debilitated. As more and more migrants poured in, however, a gap emerged between the city's glittering image and its dark reality.

Emily K. Abel shows how the association of the disease with "tramps" during the 1880s and 1890s and Dust Bowl refugees during the 1930s provoked...