SARANAC LAKE – The story of how this small Adirondack village became a center for tuberculosis research and healing is about to be told to a national television audience.

“The Forgotten Plague,” a new, hour-long “American Experience” documentary film, will air on PBS stations across the country on Feb. 10. Historic Saranac Lake, the village’s local historic preservation organization, will host a special preview screening at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Saranac Village at Will Rogers.

More than a year in the making, the film describes the spread of tuberculosis in America and the hunt for a cure, with a heavy focus on the pioneering TB research done by Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau in Saranac Lake.

It features interviews with Andrea Cooper, a scientist who studies tuberculosis at the Trudeau Institute, a nonprofit biotechnology research center in Saranac Lake, and Mary Hotaling, a local historian and author working on a new biography of Trudeau. The documentary also includes interviews with former patients who came to cure here.

Local history buffs are excited about the film and hope it will help get Trudeau’s, and Saranac Lake’s, name back out in the public eye.

“We’re a small community, but we really have a big story to tell,” said Historic Saranac Lake Executive Director Amy Catania.

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Origins

The documentary was written, directed and produced by Chana Gazit, a New York City-based, Emmy-award-winning filmmaker who was senior producer for two public television series: a four-part biography of Franklin Roosevelt and a four-part biography of Lyndon Johnson. Other documentary credits during her 30-year career include “Chicago ’68,” “Surviving the Dust Bowl” and “Meltdown at Three Mile Island.”

Gazit said the idea of making a documentary about tuberculosis came from “American Experience” Executive Producer Mark Samels.

“I think Mark had been interested in the subject for a while, and finally the stars aligned,” she said. “He approached me, and I said, ‘Sure,’ really knowing nothing about tuberculosis and really assuming, I think as most people assume, that tuberculosis is something in the very distant past that really is kind of irrelevant.”

Once she delved into the subject, Gazit said she “opened up an extraordinary window” into tuberculosis and how the battle against it had a lasting impact on the country.

“It really had a profound impact on American society,” Gazit said.

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“Pivotal figure”

Gazit started working on the project in the fall of 2013. She said she realized early on that Dr. Trudeau would be a “pivotal figure” to the story.

Born in New York City in 1848, Trudeau contracted tuberculosis in 1873 and moved with his wife and family to the Adirondacks, where he had enjoyed vacations in the past. His health improved, and in 1876, the family moved to Saranac Lake, where Trudeau started a medical practice.

After reading about a Prussian doctor’s success in treating tuberculosis with the “rest cure” in cold, clear mountain air, Trudeau founded, in 1885, the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium (known later as the Trudeau Sanatorium) for the treatment of tuberculosis patients. That transformed the village into a world-renowned TB curing center. In 1894, Trudeau created the Saranac Laboratory for the Study of Tuberculosis, the first of its kind in the U.S.

Gazit said Trudeau was the one American who came on board early with the idea that tuberculosis was caused by bacteria.

“Up until that point, all the medical and scientific community thought it was hereditary,” she said. “The notion, which was swimming around in a small group of scientists in Europe, that a bacteria could cause disease was revolutionary. It took a long time to get accepted in this country, but the person who jumped on it immediately was Edward Trudeau.”

Gazit was also drawn to a layer in the story that made it more remarkable: Trudeau’s own battle with tuberculosis and the losses he experienced to the disease, including his brother, his 16-year-old daughter and countless patients.

“There’s some level of the human spirit in Edward Trudeau that I just found truly inspiring,” she said.

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Local help

Once Gazit knew Trudeau would be one of the main figures in the documentary, she said she reached out to people in Saranac Lake.

“We couldn’t have done this film without them,” she said.

Catania was one of those people. She said she helped the filmmakers with research and helped them find tuberculosis patients who had cured at the Trudeau Sanatorium and were still alive today. Three of those survivors appear in the film: Whitney Seymour Jr., John Stoeckle and Joanne Curtis. Sherwood Davies, who was a patient at Stony Wold Sanatorium on Lake Kushaqua in the town of Franklin, is also featured.

“They were difficult to find, but once we found them, they were very happy to share,” Gazit said. “These were extraordinary people with extraordinary stories. It was such an honor and such a privilege to be able to interview them.”

Catania said she worked with the documentary crew over about a nine-month period, during which they came here to film twice. She recently had a chance to preview the finished documentary.

“I was really happy with it,” Catania said. “Of course, I was watching for the Saranac Lake angle, and I was really thrilled to see our story of TB weave throughout the film.”

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Screen time

Hotaling, who has yet to see the finished film, said she and Cooper were interviewed in the Trudeau Institute library.

“It was about three hours of an interview, so they cropped it very substantially to get the parts they used, I’m sure,” she said. “It’s a very big story, tuberculosis.”

If anyone knows Trudeau’s story, it’s Hotaling. She’s been researching his life and accomplishments for 20 years and says she is three-quarters of the way toward completing a new biography of Trudeau. “A Rare Romance in Medicine: The Life and Legacy of Edward Livingston Trudeau” is set to be released in November of this year on the 100th anniversary of Trudeau’s death.

Hotaling said the fact that Trudeau plays such a central role in a documentary about tuberculosis is no surprise.

“He was singly important to the conquest of tuberculosis in the United States,” she said. “He certainly wasn’t the only person working on it, but it was the combination that he did here of treatment and scientific research, and this was his whole life’s work. I think it’s very well deserved.”

When the producers contacted Cooper, she thought they just wanted some background information.

“So we chatted back on forth on email,” the Saranac Lake scientist said. “Then it turned out they were going to come up with all the cameras and hoopla, so we did that, too.”

Cooper said her camera time is focused largely on her area of expertise: the science behind Trudeau’s work, the tuberculosis bacteria and finding ways to fight it by boosting the body’s immune system.

Although Cooper and Hotaling are the only two locals who appear on screen, Catania said the filmmakers interviewed several other people from the area – including Ursula Trudeau, Howard Riley and Natalie LeDuc – who provided valuable background material.

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TB’s impacts

As she worked on the film, Gazit said many aspects of the tuberculosis story came as a complete surprise to her. One was the idea that interest in the “climate cure” for tuberculosis during the late 19th century helped settle the West, thanks to real estate developers and railroad promoters who lured health seekers to the newly opened territories.

“Certain cities came into existence because of tuberculosis, like Colorado Springs and Pasadena,” Gazit said. “These were cities that were started for and by people with tuberculosis.”

By the late 19th century, after people realized the disease was contagious, attitudes toward tuberculosis sufferers changed dramatically. Many were isolated in sanitariums, both for their own health and to prevent the spread of the disease.

As Americans struggled to combat tuberculosis, the film shows how this new fear of germs changed social customs. Men shaved their beards, and women’s hemlines rose to avoid contact with dangerous particles. Improved hygiene started bringing the overall rate of tuberculosis down, but in poor, crowded neighborhoods, the numbers continued to rise.

Public health officials launched an unprecedented campaign to improve the lives of the poor with methods already gaining traction from other circles of America: better housing and working conditions, reduced working hours and child labor laws.

“Tuberculosis became sort of this fuel for a whole set of reforms and a reform spirit that was happening at the time, for things that we take for granted now,” Gazit said.

Yet the anti-TB campaign also gave government officials unprecedented power to police the sick, the film shows. Health inspectors were free to monitor people’s movements and even commit people to public institutions against their will. The fight against tuberculosis raised a question that public health officials continue to grapple with today.

“It’s that essential question, which is, with an illness that is contagious, how do you balance the rights of the ill with the rights of the well?” Gazit said.

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The battle continues

The documentary closes with the discovery of streptomycin, an antibiotic, in the 1940s. When it was first administered, it seemed to be a miracle cure for tuberculosis.

“People who had been bedridden for 20 years got up and started to walk and dance,” Gazit said. “Then three months later or six months later, they began to relapse. What the scientific community came to understand was eventually the patients became resistant to streptomycin.”

By the late 1940s, scientists developed a cocktail of three drugs that attacked the TB bacteria and, if properly administered, seemed to cure the disease. For decades, deaths from tuberculosis in the U.S. declined to the point where it seemed the disease would be eradicated. Hence the name of Gazit’s documentary, “The Forgotten Plague.”

“Once antibiotics came in, and once you could get a cure and make (tuberculosis) something that rarely occurred, it just fell out of the national consciousness,” she said.

But tuberculosis hasn’t been completely wiped out, a key point raised at the end of the documentary. In the 1980s, it suddenly reappeared alongside the AIDS epidemic. It continues to kill millions worldwide each year, particularly in poorer countries.

“It is still raging in certain parts of the world,” Gazit said. “The point I would like people to think about is drug resistance. It was something that was part of the scientific understanding very early on, and it’s the thing we’re dealing with so much now with tuberculosis and other contagions.”

Tuberculosis is still forgotten when it comes to research funding, Cooper said, something she hopes people will think about when they watch the documentary.

“We get one-tenth of the funding that HIV/AIDS gets, and we’ve got to change that,” she said. “It’s just because it’s not prevalent in the U.S. We need to support international efforts that combat the disease. That’s the critical thing. Let’s hope that (tuberculosis) is un-forgotten.”

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What it means

This isn’t the first time Saranac Lake’s tuberculosis history has been highlighted in a nationally aired documentary. Catania said PBS did one a long time ago, and there was a segment on Saranac Lake in the 2008 PBS series “The Adirondacks.”

“It is exciting to get that kind of national coverage because I think it really helps interest people in coming here and finding out more,” she said.

Other cities around the country have built successful industries around heritage tourism, Catania said. That’s what she hopes this film will help foster.

“There’s a lot of places people go, and that’s really the main thing they’re looking for: to find out more, visit museums, visit cultural sites,” Catania said. “As people look for a unique place with an interesting story, I think Saranac Lake really has that.”