Saranac, it became apparent to Trudeau that both in his own case and
in that of his patients, more improvement was made in the winter than
in the summer. Indeed the saying became common that one winter was
the equal of two summers towards recovery. To what could this be
ascribed? In the winter the cold and the snow made bed rest easy and
almost a necessity, but in the summer a more active life was alluring;
less bed rest gave the tuberculous process more opportunity. Trudeau
in his history of the tuberculosis work at Saranac Lake states that
"Brehmer," in Silesia (1859), "was the originator of the sanitarium
method, the essence of which was rest, fresh air, and a daily regulation
by the physician of the patient's life and habits."
   In bacteriology, Trudeau followed eagerly the early procedures of
 Koch, first the staining of sputum, and then attempted cultivation of the
 organism. In spite of primitive equipment he was finally successful in
 obtaining pure cultures. Again, as did Koch, he began excitedly to work
 on various vaccines or tuberculins, a line of experiment he continued
 hopefully for many years. In several small series of rabbits (1892-94)
 treated with living avian tubercle bacilli, subsequent injection of virulent
 human type bacilli into the anterior chamber of the eye gave some suc-
 cess over the controls. His final statement (1894) runs: "Uncertain,
 imperfect and generally only relative as this artificial immunity against
 tuberculosis appears, it is nevertheless sufficiently marked to be demon-
 strable." In all Trudeau's vaccination experiments, he obtained this
 "relative success" only with living organisms, never with killed
or-
 ganisms or extracts.
   These experiments of Trudeau were carried out on a small scale;
 they are typical of several studies in that period and later, attempts to
 find a successful vaccine against tuberculosis. These papers are rarely
 cited, but one is reminded of the modern "relative success" with
 B.C.G. and with the vole bacillus. Another meritorious article by
 Trudeau in 1887 records experiments querying the influence of environ-
 ment on experimental tuberculosis. In a small series, five rabbits were
 injected with tubercle bacilli and permitted to run wild with ample food
 on an isolated island. At the end of four months, the animals were
 sacrificed and only one of the five showed tuberculous lesions. The
 controls all showed extensive tuberculosis. At this period, the distinc-
 tion between the bovine and human types of tubercle bacilli was not
 recognized, and it is probable that Trudeau's pure culture was the hu-
 man type isolated from a case of human pulmonary tuberculosis and


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