The Ruined Aveline House

The Aveline House was constructed in 1900 in the high Andes for Dr. Émile Aveline (1866–1912), an altitude medicine calibrator employed by mining companies and regional health authorities to standardize treatment dosages for workers suffering from hypoxia, pulmonary strain, and chronic mountain exposure across remote settlements and rail construction zones.
The villa functioned as both residence and clinical calibration station, where Aveline and his assistants recorded patient oxygen response levels, adjusted herbal treatment ratios, and maintained altitude illness registries used to regulate workforce health in high-elevation industrial projects.

His household included his wife Lucía and his assistant Mateo Quispe, both responsible for maintaining medical ledgers and pharmacological preparation records.

The turning point came in 1909 when modern compressed oxygen systems and industrial medical supply chains were introduced in mining operations, replacing localized altitude-based herbal calibration methods with standardized hospital-grade equipment.
At the same time, centralized industrial health boards began enforcing uniform treatment protocols across all elevations, eliminating independent field medical calibration stations like Aveline’s house.
Patient logs stopped arriving. Treatment requests were redirected to industrial clinics. The villa’s medical authority quietly dissolved.

By 1912, Dr. Émile Aveline was formally removed from regional medical service following the dissolution of independent altitude health stations and the consolidation of industrial mining healthcare systems.
Inside the final treatment ledger, inspectors found an incomplete oxygen dosage record for a patient who had already been transferred to a centralized clinic before local verification could be completed.
The Aveline House remains abandoned in the Andes, its prescriptions unfulfilled, its systems obsolete, and its rooms slowly fading into stone, frost, and silence.