JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

“For people suffering from tuberculosis, or just from nerves, will physicians soon prescribe a trip to the clouds in a flying clinic hospital instead of a visit to the mountains?”  That was the leading sentence in the PSM issue on the flying clinic, appearing in July 1930.  The thinking was that if people were removed to high altitudes to get a “change in the blood” to being in such an atmosphere with a lot of sun, then the higher up, the better, And so the great airship hospital idea perked up for a few years, the idea getting a big boost from French physician Charles J. Juillot. who wrote on the benefits of a floating high-altitude clinic. The hospital/clinic (“aerial sanatorium” part of the airship would be situated on the top of the airship “like a big blister”, the patients taking the sun under large celluloid windows, enjoying their stay for weeks at a time between re-supplies. 

Hospital airship, Popular Science Monthly, 1930: