Edward Livingston Trudeau

A brick at the Saranac Laboratory has been dedicated in the name of E. L. Trudeau, M.D. by Historic Saranac Lake. Dr. Edward Trudeau Trudeau's Cutter, a gift from E.H. Harriman. According to Trudeau's grandson, Harriman tried unsuccessfully to give money to Trudeau for his own use. Finally, he sent this sleigh along with a pony and groom, endowed for life, with a note reading "Try and give this to the Sanitarium." c. 1900. At the Adirondack Museum
Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, MD, MS, D. Hon, (1848-1915) was a doctor who established the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium at Saranac Lake for treatment of tuberculosis.

Trudeau was born in New York City to a family of physicians. During his late teens, his elder brother James contracted tuberculosis and Edward nursed him until his death three months later. At twenty, he enrolled in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University (then Columbia College), completing his medical training in 1871. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1873. Following conventional thinking of the times, his physicians and friends urged a change of climate. He went to live in the Adirondacks, initially at Paul Smith's Hotel, spending as much time as possible in the open; he subsequently regained his health. In 1876 he moved to Saranac Lake and established a medical practice among the sportsmen, guides and lumber camps of the region.

In 1882, Trudeau read about Prussian Dr. Hermann Brehmer's success treating tuberculosis with the "rest cure" in cold, clear mountain air. Following this example, Trudeau founded the Adirondack Cottage Sanitorium, with the support of several of the wealthy businessmen he had met at Paul Smiths. In 1894, after a fire destroyed his small laboratory, Trudeau organized the Saranac Laboratory for the Study of Tuberculosis, the first laboratory in the United States for the study of tuberculosis. Renamed the Trudeau Institute, the laboratory continues to study infectious diseases. One of Trudeau's early patients was author Robert Louis Stevenson and in gratitude, Stevenson presented Trudeau with a complete set of his works, each one dedicated with a different verse by Stevenson (the books were later lost in a fire). Trudeau's fame helped establish Saranac Lake as a center for the treatment of tuberculosis.

Trudeau had a camp on Upper Saint Regis Lake, and was active in the community, helping to found St. John's in the Wilderness Episcopal Church in Paul Smiths, where he is interred, as well as the Church of St. Luke, the Beloved Physician, in Saranac Lake in 1879, and the Village of Saranac Lake, of which he was the first president (mayor) in 1892.

Trudeau and his wife, Charlotte Beare, had one daughter, "Chatte," who died of tuberculosis in her late teens; and three sons, Edward Livingston Trudeau Jr., a physician who died in his twenties; Henry, who died in infancy; and Francis Berger Trudeau, a physician who succeeded his father at the sanatorium as director until 1954. Francis Berger Trudeau's son, Francis B. Trudeau, Jr. was the father of cartoonist Garry Trudeau.

On May 12, 2008, the United States Postal Service issued a 76 cent stamp picturing Trudeau, part of the Distinguished Americans series. An inscription identifies him as a "phthisiologist" (an obsolete term for a tuberculosis specialist). ¹

Mrs. Trudeau, Dr. Trudeau, Dr. Luis Walton

See also

External links

Trudeau's gravesite, St. Johns in the Wilderness Church

Comments:

1This article appeared originally on Wikipedia as Edward Livingston Trudeau; its edit history there reflects its authorship. It is licensed under the GDFL.