The nineteenth-century notion that Southern California's sunny climate could cure tuberculosis, asthma, rheumatism, and a host of other diseases triggered a rush of health seekers to the region. By the end of the century, these settlers from the East had inflated land values, caused building booms, inaugurated new types of businesses, and founded such towns as Pasadena, Riverside, and Palm Springs.

Baur investigates this migration's effect on the settlement and development of Southern California, focusing on boosterism, resort advertising, medicine and pseudomedicine, and sanitariums. When his study of the region's health-resort industry was originally published in 1959, he was hailed as the Herodotus of the health movement of Southern California.

John E. Baur was a professor of history at California State University, Northridge.

"Baur shows how health resorts proliferated in the Los Angeles-San Diego area and how their clientele, largely composed of those suffering from tuberculosis, permanently altered the general character of the region."—Pacific Historical Review

"Baur's work follows several fascinating byways, to mineral springs and health colonies, into medical and pseudo-medical practices, coming to the conclusion that this great immigration of the fin de siècle had a lasting social effect on the region."—Westways