In 1895 a group of prominent Calgary citizens extolled the advantages of their city as a site for a national tuberculosis sanatorium. The city, they boasted, was the ‘Denver of Canada’ and an ideal home for consumptives. Area physicians outlined the specific medical advantages of the region's climate, geography and elevation. Far removed from the congestion and foul air of Europe and eastern Canada the consumptive would benefit from the salubrious prairie west's clear bracing air and endless sunshine. Needless to say the national sanatorium was ultimately established in Ontario. The Calgarians were not, however, eager to attract all consumptives. The region's Aboriginal people, increasingly exposed to infection and to the repressive policies of the state, came to be seen as fundamentally deficient in their reaction to the disease. The Indian reserves served to isolate and contain both their disease and their poverty. Fifty years later, in 1945, hundreds of Edmonton residents publicly and loudly objected to the federal government's plans to establish a sanatorium in their city for Aboriginal people. They demanded that the government establish the sanatorium somewhere – anywhere – else. A spatial analysis of the shifting cultural and medical understandings of the disease, from consumption as a condition of the delicate and wealthy to tuberculosis as an infectious disease of the poor and the Aboriginal, highlights the roles of race and class in the construction of disease and its treatment.