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I

n 1894 Harper’s Magazine carried an article about the Laurentians by McGill University principal Sir William Dawson. A young nurse in New York, upon reading it, decided that she had to visit, and set off to Ste. Agathe. Her name was Elizabeth Wand, and her seven year love-affair with our area is documented in her memoirs.

A single woman with a pioneer spirit, she quickly realised that Ste. Agathe was an ideal place for a health spa, and she purchased a small cottage and headed off to Montreal to introduce herself to the doctors there. By the end of her first summer, she had purchased half of a farm on the Tour du Lac and designed her first building. The following summer, R. Wilson-Smith, a past mayor of Montreal, became one of her guests, and by the end of that same summer, he had bought the property from Miss Wand. This house still stands on Tour du Lac and is known as Auberge de la Tour du Lac.

The indomitable Miss Wand bought the other half of the same farm and built herself another complex. This she named Quisisana, which she said means ‘Here is health’. Many of her guests, who came originally for reasons of health, bought land and stayed on. In her own words, she was a pioneer in the creation of our recreational community: “Lake Brulé had its beginnings before I went out, but Trout Lake, Manitou, Lake St. Joseph and Lake Tremblant all benefited by my pioneer work. I also sold lots on my own property, and soon was the centre of a nice little colony of my own.”

Her efforts were doomed by their own success. While most of her guests were patients who were convalescing, Ste. Agathe was becoming identified as the best setting to deal with the major health problem of human history. No other convalescent home could co-exist in a town with a tuberculosis santiarium. The fears of contagion were too great.

In 1873, two years after he graduated from medical school, Dr. Edward Trudeau of New York was diagnosed with tuberculosis. As a teenager, he had watched his older brother die of the disease, and he surely felt that he was soon to follow. After several failed attempts to shake the disease, he decided to move to Saranac Lake in order to rest, and perhaps die, in a beautiful area where he had vacationed for a few summers when he was younger. When he arrived at Paul Smith’s Hotel, the owner’s brother-in-law carried him up two flights of stairs, two steps at a time, and remarked that the Doctor weighed no more than a dried lamb skin.

Tuberculosis was such a common disease that it could well be the candidate for the greatest single enemy that our species has ever confronted. According to F. Ryan, author of Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told, an estimated one billion people died of the disease between 1700 and 1900. To add to the impact of the disease, it tended to cut people down in the prime of life. A German botanist named Hermann Brehmer contracted it in the 1840’s and moved to the Himalayas to die while pursuing his interests. To his surprise, he was cured. He subsequently went on to study medicine and to propose a rest-cure for the disease, and in Germany in the 1850’s, he opened the first tuberculosis sanitarium.*

Luckily, Dr. Trudeau would learn more about Dr. Brehmer’s cure. Over the course of that summer, the progress of the disease was arrested and he began to recover. Saranac Lake at that time was a vacation spot for the summer only, and when Trudeau moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, for the winter, his disease returned with the same force it had had. During his second summer, Dr. Loomis, who met him at Saranac Lake, encouraged him to stay for the winter, since he was so very happy there. Dr. Loomis expected him to die, but Trudeau, studying the techniques developed by Dr. Brehmer, recovered.

He dedicated the balance of his life to developing sanitaria on Dr. Brehmer’s model and it was to this fortuitous environment that many well-to-do Montrealeres were sent in the 1890’s and early 1900’s.

During the last decade of the 19^th century, Dr. Arthur Richer explored the possibility of building a tuberculosis sanitarium in Ste. Agathe. Dr. Richer was educated at the Pasteur Institute in Switzerland and he was the head of the Montreal League of the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis. The ever reliable Album historique de la paroisse de Ste-Agathe-des-Monts documents the opening of the hospital in 1899 at which 200 doctors were present. There were 25 rooms. It goes on to mention that the Richer sanitarium was destroyed by fire in 1902, but Ste. Agathe’s involvement with tuberculosis was only just beginning.

*According to the Webster’s New International Dictionary, copyright 1913, a sanitarium is a sanatorium used exclusively for health care, while a sanatorium is a resort with a salubrious climate. Therefore, while Ste Agathe may have been a sanatorium, the institution was a sanitarium. Rot,  my spellguard.