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That magic mountain

For three days in midwinter, 1917, the stepchildren of Robert Louis Stevenson, namely Lloyd Osbourne and Mrs. Isobel Field, had been special guests of this mountain village called Saranac Lake. By then this community had developed a consumptive culture, where ‘taking the cure’ was the slogan of a town that had become a mecca for victims of a disease they called the ‘white death,’ that is, tuberculosis. Patients of all backgrounds, rich to poor, converged here from all corners of the globe, all looking for the same thing and hoping to find it within sight of Baker Mountain. Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, through his example and life’s work, was to blame for this movement that had transformed a hamlet of lumberjacks, guides, and trappers into a sprawling health industry.

It is common knowledge that RLS was one of the throng that came here for relief from sickness and that Trudeau was his doctor. It’s less commonly known that Trudeau had found no active strain of TB in his illustrious patient from Scotland, that he was not a victim of the ‘white death’ after all. Whatever he had was apparently worse than that. Trudeau’s treatment boiled down to good advice which his new friend ignored: quit smoking cigarettes and stay in Saranac Lake.

“When Robert Louis Stevenson lived there, Saranac Lake village was but a backwoods hamlet. The first locomotive had not yet startled the buck and the bear.”

“The community which is now the metropolis of the Adirondacks had in 1887 less than a handful of the thousands who have since followed the trail first blazed in that region by Dr. Edward L. Trudeau, himself a victim of tuberculosis” (The Penny Piper of Saranac, S. Chalmers).

An interesting ‘what if’ question might be what if RLS had died in Saranac Lake followed by newspapers claiming that he had been a patient of Dr. Trudeau when it happened. What actually did happen was good for business by way of an unsolicited public relations boon for Trudeau and his pulmonary project in the mountains west of Lake Champlain. In March of 1888, a month before the Stevenson expedition left town, the most popular writer of the day–at least in the U.S.A.–Robert Louis Stevenson, publicly endorsed Saranac Lake and its outstanding resident physician, Dr. E.L. Trudeau, as the best place to be if you have TB.

“Mr. R.L. Stevenson on the Adirondack Cure” was the heading of Stevenson’s letter to the editor of The Evening Post, a big New York City newspaper, March 8, 1888. Stevenson knew a thing or two about sanatoriums, health resorts, and doctors. After all, he was a career invalid. Before his Adirondack exile, Louis had done time in two of Europe’s most renowned havens for health seekers: Menton and Davos.

He saw Menton first, a town in southern France pleasantly placed on Homer’s “wine dark sea,” the Mediterranean. At twenty-two and growing in confidence, Stevenson had used that winter’s experience to supply substance for his first published article that he dared to put his real name to. “Ordered South” appeared in the May 1874 edition of MacMillan’s Magazine, a copy of which is at Baker’s.

During the 1870s, as RLS was living the material for his biographers, the climatologists and medical professionals had been colluding to flip-flop one of their pet theories about TB. Instead of the seaside, now they were pointing to the mountains as the best place to combat the ‘white death.’ That school of thinking had started in Europe then crossed the ocean where it got into the head of Dr. Trudeau, who liked to hunt on Mt. Pisgah. For RLS, it was just another topic to use up ink.

“There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has followed in the lives of the sick folk” is the way the invalid started his piece, “Health and Mountains,” one of four articles under the heading of Swiss Notes. Speaking about the former seaside spas of the Riviera, he wrote that “these were certainly beautiful places to live in and the climate was wooing in its softness. Yet there was a latent shiver in the sunshine … and these mild shores would sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death … The invalid is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a ruder air shall medicine him; the demon of cold is no longer to be fled from but bearded in his den…but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an invalid’s weakness make up among them a prison of the most effective kind.”

Reading Swiss Notes is like riding a pendulum between the pros and cons of being sick and stuck in the Alps. The air spoke for itself while diversions helped some to dull the reality of having to be there.

“A magazine club supplies you with everything…Grand tournaments are organized at chess, draughts, billiards, and whist…wandering artists drop into our mountain valley…Christmas and New Year are solemnized…a charity bazaar, even balls enliven the evenings.”

There was also skating and tobogganing, “one of the most exhilarating follies in the world and the tobogganing invalid is early reconciled to somersaults.” But at the end of every day the exile would look across the valley and feel “in his heart of hearts” that “the mountains are about you like a trap; you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and corners, and can change only one for another.” It had been from one of those holes that the firm of Samuel Lloyd Osbourne and Co. had released the Moral Emblems of RLS unto an unsuspecting world.

R.L. Stevenson ended Swiss Notes with an appraisal: “The frame of mind of the invalid upon the Alps is a sort of intermittent youth, with periods of lassitude. The fountain of Juventus does not play steadily in these parts; but there it plays, and possibly nowhere else.”

Five years later, RLS would find ‘Juventus’ bursting out all over the place in a frontier town straddling a river in a faraway mountain valley of singular beauty and frigid cold: Saranac Lake.

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