How the clean, cold Adirondack air made nearby Saranac Lake into the great tuberculosis-cure town of America — Dr. Trudeau, the cure cottages, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Just west of here, at a place called Saranac Lake, these mountains once did something the whole country came to believe in: they healed the dying. Let me tell you how.
Go back to the eighteen-seventies. Tuberculosis — they called it consumption — was the great killer of the age, a slow, wasting death that took people by the millions, and there was no cure, no medicine, nothing. And a young doctor named Edward Trudeau caught it himself, and was told to go off somewhere pleasant and die. So he came up here to the Adirondacks, the wild woods he loved, to spend his last days hunting and resting in the cold clean mountain air. And a strange thing happened. He didn't die. He got better.
Trudeau became convinced it was the air itself — the cold, pure, pine-scented mountain air, and rest, and sunshine — and he built a little sanitarium at Saranac Lake where the sick could come and take the 'fresh-air cure.' And they came, by the thousands, from all over the world. The whole town reshaped itself around them: they built special 'cure cottages' with long open porches, and the patients would lie out there bundled in blankets, breathing that cold Adirondack air, hour after hour, through the summers and through the brutal winters, waiting to be healed.
And some famous folks came to take the cure — the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, the one who wrote Treasure Island, spent a winter up here wrapped in furs on a cold porch, and said the air was worth a fortune. It wasn't a perfect cure — plenty still died — but for decades, before there was any real medicine, this cold mountain air was the best hope a consumptive had on this earth, and Saranac Lake was the place you came to chase it. So breathe deep as you drive, friend. This same air was once the most precious medicine in America. Roll on.
Photo: Mwanner at en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0
