Historic Saranac Lake

	Dr. E.L. Trudeau in Saranac Lab, 1895

SARANAC LABORATORY► HISTORY

"The sanatorium represents
 what we know about tuberculosis.
The laboratory represents
 what we do not know, but must find out." Dr. E. R. Baldwin, 1924

“A Landmark from the Dawn of Science”

The remarkable story of the Saranac Laboratory begins with its founder, Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, who came to the Adirondacks in 1873, seriously ill with tuberculosis. Here his health improved in the mountain climate.

After seven years and repeated attempts to return to New York City, all with bad effects on his health, Trudeau built a winter home in Saranac Lake, and founded the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium to care for incipient cases of tuberculosis among the working poor.   

On March 24, 1882, in Germany, Dr. Robert Koch read his paper, “The Etiology of Tuberculosis,” with its startling conclusion that the disease was caused by an identifiable organism, the tubercle bacillus. Trudeau read abstracts of the paper in medical journals, and it excited his imagination. C.M. Lea gave the doctor a Christmas present of “a very full translation,” hand-written in a copy book. Wrote Trudeau, “I read every word of it over and over again.”

Convinced by Koch’s logic and enchanted by the possibility of a cure, Trudeau determined to learn how to stain and recognize the tubercle bacillus under a microscope in order to try Koch’s experiments for himself. Trudeau spent several days in Dr. T. Mitchell Prudden’s makeshift laboratory in New York, struggling through the difficult process until he became proficient enough to work alone.

“In the fall of 1885, as soon as I had equipped my little laboratory-room, “ wrote Trudeau, “I began to work.” At first he used his eight-by-twelve foot home office. Since the house was lighted by kerosene and heated with wood, “on very cold nights the doctor often had to get up and replenish the fuel, “ noted historian Alfred Donaldson. “These quarters were so cramped … ” Trudeau said, “that I soon built a little addition off my office, and this became the laboratory in which I worked until … 1893.” SCIENCE►