I can remember exactly where I was when my mother told me my father had died. We had snow. I was sitting on the step, trying to put on my boots. She came over and said, "Sherwood, your father died last night." She was very depressed. And I felt concerned for my mother because what she had gone through. My mother's father had tuberculosis and he died when she was one year old. Her mother had tuberculosis and was in and out of hospitals. My mother developed tuberculosis. And, of course, my father succumbed to tuberculosis. And then I had developed tuberculosis. It's mind-boggling. I mean - You think of-- You worry about both your mother and your father. But then you say, "Well, what's gonna happen to me?" For centuries, people called it the Captain of Death. By the dawn of the 19th century, the disease had killed one in seven of all people that had ever lived -- more than any other illness. The ancient Greeks called it "consumption." The name consumption came from the emaciation As the fever built and as the coughing continued, the sensation of essentially coughing yourself to death. The disease is what used to be called "the wasting disease." You just get thinner and thinner. And so if you look at pictures of people who are dying of the disease, their cheekbones are very prominent. Their eyes seem very large and hollow. All the flesh has wasted off their face and their throat. Victims were racked with hacking, bloody coughs, debilitated by pain in their lungs, and so consumed with fatigue they could barely get out of bed. The end could come quickly or unfold slowly over years of suffering. There was no known cure. In the early 1800s, consumption struck America with a vengeance, ravaging communities, touching the lives of almost every family. No one was spared. Rich, poor, young, old, and no one knew who was going to be attacked, and how long they would live. Women who had children understood that their children might well become orphans, and that they had to train them how to behave in other people's households. There's a desperation in the stories of, "How can I be sure that when I'm gone my children will be taken care of?" And a lot of talk about death, and you had to train children for dealing with death, and dealing with the death of parents and how to go on and manage. Faced with a deadly and painful disease, tens of thousands of Americans would journey to far-flung parts of the country -- some to the remote wilderness, others to new cities in the South and West -- all in search of an elusive cure. In 1873, the Adirondack Mountains in New York was one of the most remote regions in the country. That June, a 25-year-old physician arrived from New York City to spend his final days in the woods and lakes that he had loved as a child. Edward Trudeau had just received a crushing diagnosis. The doctor tells him that the upper third of one of his lungs is involved in an active tuberculous process. He just stutters his way out the door and stands on the stoop and he says, "The world had gone dark." He just-- he couldn't believe it. Trudeau had no illusions about the disease. Seven years earlier, it had claimed the life of his older brother. Trudeau marked his brother's death as one of the turning points in his life. At the time he'd been very close to his brother, and that experience of caring for him in his final days. Imagine then his horror when he finds out he himself develops tuberculosis. He was sure he would die. He expected to die and he couldn't believe that, you know, this had happened to him. Trudeau's doctor had told him to spend what time he had left in nature. Physicians of the day believed consumption, as they called it, was hereditary. But they had started to notice that fresh air and outdoor living could sometimes change the course of the illness. Though he could barely walk, Trudeau pursued his passion for hunting by lying down in a canoe padded with balsam branches. "My hunting blood responded at once," he recalled. "And I forgot all the misery and sickness I had gone through." By the end of the summer, Trudeau had put on 15 pounds. But as soon as he returned to the city, his health deteriorated. Three years later, nearing death, Trudeau decided to move his wife and two young children to a small Adirondack outpost called Saranac Lake, one of the coldest places in the country. Even in the dead of winter, Trudeau's health improved. He was becoming convinced the clean mountain air was like medicine for the lungs. "The open-air life," he declared, "has a wonderful effect upon my health." Using climate to treat consumption goes all the way back to Greek medicine. In the 19th century, when they started to get more scientific, they also started to try to break that down and think, "Is it cold mountain air? Is it warm dry air that does better for the consumptive?" Some would say, "Go to the mountains. The air is good there." Others would say, "Go to the beach. Sit in the sun." In fact, physicians advocated all of the above. No region would hold greater lure for consumptives than the newly opened territories of the American West. The men who began to explore the West came back with all sorts of stories. That the West was Eden, that the West was health-giving, that people who were thin went out there and became healthy and strong. And so, you began to get this image of the West as a place to go because you would get well. Come West and be cured. Come West and get life.
