Since coming to Saranac Lake, I’ve been volunteering at the Historical Society. As part of this gig, I have the chance to handle some pretty cool stuff relating to the history of tuberculosis. You may know that the Trudeau Sanatorium was the first place the “fresh-air cure” was embraced as a treatment for tb.
Mimi Inglese, the protagonist in my novel, Seeds of the Pomegranate, has tuberculosis. For her, the illness meant the end of her career as an artist; for so many others, it meant a slow and painful death, as their bodies were literally “consumed” by the disease.
For the last month or so, I’ve been cataloging books given to the Society by the estate of a physician who worked at the DCD in Atlanta. There have been many treasures in this collection, including texts that describe the I’ve come acrossAs a volunteer cataloger for the Saranac Lake Historical Society, I have the opportunity to handle many of the medical and scientific texts relating to tb. This week, as I finished up this project, I came across this gem.
Written in 1942 by psychiatrist Harry Wilmer, Huber the Tuber is the story of a tubercle bacillus (the bacteria that causes tb), who adventures in Lungland, with his pals, Nasty von Sputum and Rusty the Bloodyvitch. Their goal is total control of their host. They fight against the Home Guard Army and Corpuscle Nelson, and in the end, they are defeated. Note the language of military conquest — the U.S. was, at this point, about to go to War.
Dr. Wilmer, who wrote Huber the Tuber while convalescing from tb, went on to write Corky the Killer, a story about syphilis infection. These books are possibly the first of their kind — edu-comics, they’d probably be called today, though they read a lot like graphic novels. f
As you look through these pages, please remember Dr. Wilmer’s disclaimer:
Any resemblance to tubercle bacilli living or dead is purely coincidental; the events portrayed, however, are [still] occurring every day.”
