Healing Tuberculosis in the Woods: Medicine and Science at the End of the Nineteenth Century (review)

Healing Tuberculosis in the Woods mingles magic with medicine, regional lore with historical facts. It is David Ellison’s self-conscious efforts to explicate the healing power of his family’s annual summer vacations in the North Woods. The book centers on the life and accomplishments of Saranac Lake’s founder and the Adirondacks’ most venerated citizen, Edward Livingston Trudeau. Ellison relies primarily on Trudeau’s autobiography and on medical and popular articles, so as to highlight Trudeau’s charisma and accomplishments. Ellison is so intent on glorifying Trudeau that he opens the book with a lengthy description of the tributes Trudeau received at his funeral. He closes the first chapter with a rhetorical question: “How could one health worker attract such universal recognition of his character, his clinical skills, his scientific acumen, and his leadership abilities?” (p. 4). To find an answer, Ellison recounts in extensive detail Trudeau’s childhood, the books Trudeau read, his research, the founding of the sanatorium, the death of his children, and the spread of sanatorium care. Ellison is so totally captivated by the virtues of Trudeau that he omits interpretations that complicate this heroic image.

Surprisingly, Ellison does not refer to recent historical studies on the history of tuberculosis, the sanatorium movement, or the experiences of patients and caregivers. Nor does he seem to realize that he is telling the story of Trudeau’s life as Trudeau and his boosters self-consciously composed it. In the final chapter, he does make an effort to evaluate Trudeau’s research. He notes that Trudeau was frustrated by his inability to find a cure or a vaccine for tuberculosis; nevertheless, he insists, Trudeau “kept his laboratory and the sanitarium [sic] at the forefront of tuberculosis studies” (p. 188). He then goes on to note that while the results of Trudeau’s research “were not spectacular, they were certainly better than complete failure” (p. 188).

Ellison discusses Trudeau’s experience with tuberculosis through 1876, but he does not reckon with the fact that although Trudeau had several remissions, his adult life was an ongoing battle with disease. Thus, Ellison maintains: “Trudeau was a living testimony that the outdoor method ‘cured’ tuberculosis” (p. 187). Living in Saranac Lake may have prolonged Trudeau’s life, and it did redirect his career, but in letters located at the Trudeau Institute that Ellison does not cite, Trudeau wrote about the fact that he was rarely symptom-free and discussed his own ambivalence about having to take the cure again and again, while each time the attacks left him more physically frail. Indeed, one could argue that Trudeau’s lengthy encounter with tuberculosis epitomized the experience of being a patient with a chronic debilitating disease.

Finally, Ellison seems unaware of the fact that sanatoriums, even the Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium, had a darker side. Memoirs and letters of patients who went there as well as those who were confined in other facilities in the region (which are also missing from this account) provide yet another angle of vision that undercuts Ellison’s view. Indeed, the book is of limited interest to historians. It serves as a reminder that whatever the personal rewards of a nostalgic journey into the past, it should not be confused with historical analysis.