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went away, leading to the conclusion that the King's touch had healed them.
The most common treatment over the years was to move to a different climate. Some tuberculosis patients went to the seashore; others preferred the mountains. In Europe, patients went to the Mediterranean and to the Alps. In India, they went to the desert. In the United States, they went to Colorado, Minnesota, and the Arizona desert - some even moved into Kentucky's Mammoth Cave. Those who hadn't the strength to travel were given pillows of pine needles to sleep on or seaweed to put under their bed to mimic a mountain or seashore setting.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, people who could afford it began to go to "sanatoriums" for treatment. The first were a cross between resort and hospital, inns in the mountains where people followed the latest cure fads, bundled up to rest outdoors for fresh air year round, and discussed their disease over lavish meals. The German novelist Thomas Mann based his classic novel The Magic Mountain on an alpine sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, where patients gorged on five meals a day.
Edward Livingston Trudeau established the first American sanatorium at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. Trudeau first came to the Adirondacks as a healthy young man to hunt and fish in the wilderness. A few years later having developed tuberculosis, he returned too weak to stand but determined to spend what few weeks he thought he had left to live in the beautiful woods where he had once felt so alive. The guides filled a canoe with pine boughs and pillows to make a soft place for him to lie down, and took him out hunting. By propping himself up on one arm, he was able to fire his gun, and on his first day he killed a deer. To his own surprise, by the end of three months he was walking in the woods, was eating like a horse, and had gained fifteen pounds. Trudeau determined to stay in th woods and to build a sanatiorium so that others could reap the benefits of a stay in the wild and beautiful place.
As time went on, sanatoriums became as much places to isolate the sick from the healthy as they were places of healing: they were for the poor as well as the rich, were less lavish, were not necessarily in beautiful places, and did not necessarily have good food. Treatment for the most part consisited of a long isolated rest away from the healthy world.
Charles Moses, who was seventeen when he left New York City for the Ray Brook Sanatorium upstate in 1920, wrote: