Consumption in the Adirondacks: Print Culture and the Curative Climate

Consumption in the AdirondacksPrint Culture and the Curative Climate Mark Sturges (bio) Nearing the end of his life, Edward Livingston Trudeau, the most famous tuberculosis doctor in America, penned a medical memoir that tells the story of his own diagnosis with tuberculosis, his miraculous recovery after retreating into the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York, his formation of the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium, and his scientific research in the emerging field of bacteriology. While chronicling his professional accomplishments, Trudeau also devotes a great deal of attention to his leisure pursuits, recalling memorable hunting trips, paying tribute to his favorite Adirondack guides, and delivering a larger-than-life character sketch of Adirondack hotel proprietor Paul Smith. Thus, An Autobiography (1915) depicts Trudeau as both nineteenth-century sportsman and turn-of-the-century scientist—Gilded Age alter egos that he adopted at pivotal moments in his struggle against tuberculosis. To visually reinforce this dual identity, some early printings of the book include two portraits of Trudeau in the attire of his twin passions. The first photograph, dating from roughly 1873, when Trudeau spent his first summer in the Adirondacks in pursuit of health, features a genteel sportsman dressed in fashionable hunting clothes, sitting on a stump, cap on the ground, trusty rifle resting between his legs. The second photograph, taken for promotional purposes in the Saranac Laboratory circa 1894, pictures a modern medical doctor wearing a white lab coat, standing at a workbench before an array of test tubes and beakers, performing his latest scientific experiment. These two portraits embody different (but related) cultural responses to tuberculosis in the late nineteenth century, illustrating in snapshot form the popular belief in the health benefits of a change in climate and the expanding medical knowledge of the disease based on the germ theory of bacterial infection.1 Published on the eve of U.S. involvement in World War I, Trudeau's Autobiography is [End Page 109] Click for larger view View full resolution "Dr. Trudeau, The Huntsman (1873), Three Months after Arrival at Paul Smith's." Edward Livingston Trudeau, An Autobiography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1916), plate 3. (courtesy of the adirondack collection, saranac lake free library) [End Page 110] Click for larger view View full resolution "Dr. Trudeau, The Investigator (1894)." Edward Livingston Trudeau, An Autobiography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1916), plate 9. (courtesy of the adirondack collection, saranac lake free library). noteworthy, not only because it captures overlapping attitudes toward human health and the environment in the post–Civil War era, but also because it displays how a culture of outdoor recreation influenced the nation's medical treatment of tuberculosis. In the second half of the nineteenth century, tuberculosis patients flocked to remote corners of the United States, seeking refuge from the oppressive air of industrial cities and hoping for the health benefits of a curative climate. From the arid deserts of New Mexico to the boreal forests of northern New York, from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a cure industry emerged, profited for a half-century, and left lasting impacts on the cultural landscapes of those regions.2 During this era, print culture, especially [End Page 111] sportsman's literature, played a persuasive role in debates about the curative potential of America's wilderness regions. Taking the Adirondack Mountains of New York as a case study and Trudeau's life story as a touchstone, this article examines a few popular works of regional literature and reconstructs the conversation that unfolded across the span of Trudeau's influential career. In the two decades following the Civil War, popular authors like William H. H. Murray, Marc Cook, and George Washington Sears, in collaboration with medical experts like Dr. Alfred Loomis and Dr. Joseph Stickler, fashioned a narrative of the Adirondacks as a curative climate, constructing a cultural myth that fueled the development of a tourist economy and facilitated the transformation of the region into a health-seeking destination. Not only did these writers influence environmental attitudes underlying the belief in a wilderness cure, effectively training male readers to seek an outdoor experience that would renew their health and, simultaneously, their masculinity, but they also...