Historic Saranac Lake

The laboratory was open "to any doctor wishing to avail himself of its unsual advantages for the study of tuberculosis." At left: Trudeau School for Aadvanced Study of Tuberculosis, at its headquarters, the Saranac Laboratory, 1917.

SARANAC LABORATORY► SCIENCE

The extraordinary cold mountain environment in which Dr. E.L. Trudeau was working demanded that he improvise special equipment to maintain the constant high temperature needed for germs to grow. The heat also had to be kept up for a long time compared to “any of the disease-producing organisms discovered before it.” After many attempts, Trudeau became “the second experimenter in the country” to grow a pure culture of the tubercle bacillus. “With these cultures I repeated all of Koch’s inoculation experiments, “ and then “began making original ones.”

In December of 1892, young Dr. E. R. Baldwin from New Haven [Connecticut] applied for entry to the sanitarium. Trudeau wrote “When asked what made him think he had tuberculosis, he quite floored me by his answer: that he had used his microscope and knew he had it … At my invitation he came to the Laboratory the day after he arrived in town and offered to help me there in any way.”

“For years Baldwin would carry his bundle of the literature over to the doctor’s house in the evening,” Dr. Allen K. Krause remembered, “and there read to him what was going on in tuberculosis, particularly in Germany,” and Trudeau would tell him what was happening in France. “This pair formed an almost ideal combination for scientific work.”

Late in 1893, an imported laboratory heater set fire to the Trudeau family’s house while they were away and burned it to the ground. “There is nothing like fire to make a man do the Phoenix trick,” consoled Dr. William Osler.

The day after the fire, George C. Cooper visited Trudeau, his doctor and his friend, to offer him “a good stone and steel laboratory, one that will never burn up. Plan it just as you want it, complete, and I will be glad to pay for it and give it to you personally.” The name “Saranac Laboratory” was a compromise between Cooper and Trudeau, who each wanted to name it after the other.

©2008 Historic Saranac Lake. All rights reserved.

Historic photographs courtesy of the Adirondack Room, Saranac Lake Free Library, unless otherwise noted. Copy and reuse restrictions apply.