Dr. Trudeau: "To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always"

In 1873 a twenty-five-year-old American doctor named Edward Trudeau was handed a death sentence. He had tuberculosis.

In that era consumption was a terminal diagnosis. Most people who caught it were dead within a few years, and medicine could do almost nothing. Doctors had a grim joke among themselves: keep your distance from the patient, and you have done your duty by the patient.

Trudeau made one last effort. He went back to the shore of Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks, where he had hunted and fished as a young man, and he waited to die quietly.

Then something strange happened. The clean air, the regular hours, the rest — his condition did not worsen. Day by day it improved.

Lying in a bed by the water, he worked out something that would change the fate of thousands of people. What a consumptive needed might not be a specific drug that did not exist. It might be air, rest, food, and a life with hope in it. If I have been helped by this place, he thought, then I will make this place a lakeshore for every patient.

He did it. In 1877 he built a small cottage by the lake and took in fellow patients, teaching them to rest, to breathe the outdoor air, to eat on a schedule. In 1887, beside the cottage, he built the first tuberculosis research laboratory in America. He was treating his own disease and studying it at the same time.

Within a few decades Saranac Lake had become a synonym for the tuberculosis cure, and patients came from all over the world. The sanatorium model he started lengthened countless lives in the years when the disease was still incurable, and it became an early form of modern rehabilitation medicine.

He never cured himself. Trudeau died by the lake in 1915, having lived with the disease for more than forty years. But he added years to other people's lives, and he used his own body as a specimen to push the research forward. After his death, the words carved at his memorial were these, and they went around the medical world:

"To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always."

Why do those three lines still land? Because they are honest. They admit the boundary of medicine — many diseases will not be cured. And they point the direction anyway: if it cannot be cured, you are still not abandoned. Cure happens sometimes. Relief happens often. Comfort happens always. The sentence takes a doctor's work back from technique to person. What sits in front of you is not only a disease. It is a frightened human being.

The best comfort in the world is not "you will be fine." It is "fine or not, I am not going anywhere" — and Trudeau, practicing for forty years while carrying the disease himself, made that sentence into the shape of his life.

His memorial still stands above Saranac Lake. Medical students come and stand a long time in front of the carving. One visitor wrote a line in the guest book that has been passed around ever since: "I studied medicine for eight years, and the first time I understood what I was doing was in front of a stone tablet. The largest prescription in our profession does not name a drug. It names a person."

Life at the lake in those years was not an ordeal either. The sanatorium had a library and a veranda. Patients encouraged one another, and many of them learned by that water to live quietly alongside their illness. Some who recovered came back years later for no other reason than to sit on the old bench and say to a new patient: "I got well here. You will too." That plain sentence became another medicine at the sanatorium, one nobody else could prescribe.