Beginning of the End

When 19-year-old Francis Trudeau fell ill in New York with tuberculosis, the disease was still a deadly mystery, romanticized in such plays as La Dame aux Cornelias, but dreaded by its victims and misunderstood by helpless doctors. That was in 1865, and since there were no nurses trained to care for TB victims, Francis Trudeau's 16-year-old younger brother Edward took over the task of sitting with him in a stuffy, tightly sealed room and administering useless cough medicines for four months until Francis died.

Eight years later (by then a doctor with a wife and child), Edward found he had TB himself. Remembering with horror the airless cell in which his brother suffered, Trudeau moved to Bloomingdale, in a remote section of New York's Adirondack Mountains, and three years later to nearby Saranac Lake. Inexplicably, he began to recover in the cool, fresh air. In 1885, on a $350 gift from a friend, Trudeau founded the. U.S.'s first TB sanatorium (first patients: two consumptive factory girls). Trudeau shunted patients out into the biting mountain air, made them sleep, bundled snugly, under the sky. They drove through the Adirondacks, picked wild strawberries and raided maple trees in late winter for sap. Prodded by desperation and Trudeau's apparent miracle-working (of 12,500 patients cared for since 1885, more than 5,000 are still alive today), TB sufferers swarmed to Saranac Lake. The sanatorium grew until it had 52 buildings and a staff of 144.

This week Director Gordon Meade (Edward Trudeau died in 1915) announced the closing of Trudeau Sanatorium. Trudeau will henceforth devote its $1,800,000 plant and $3,000,000 endowment to basic research in tuberculosis and allied diseases. As a sanatorium, Trudeau was a victim of success. In the past year, only 60 patients, about a third of capacity, came to be cured at Saranac, leaving Trudeau with a deficit of $90,000. Public hospitals are handling more and more TB patients; wonder drugs make possible extensive home and outpatient treatment; and the importance of climate in treatment has been sharply discounted. Finally, as Trudeau doctors will point out, TB has dropped in 50 years from the nation's second-ranking killer to seventh, takes only 6% as many lives as it did in 1900. Explained one Saranac doctor: "TB isn't dead, but sanatorium treatment is."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.