I noticed the small brown and yellow marker by the side of the road.
I said “Quick- turn left!” and my friend swerved the car around and sped down the left turn off the scenic route we were driving on through the Adirondack Mountains last summer, near the
village of
Saranac Lake,
New York.
We had found the
Saranac Laboratory Museum, dedicated to the doctors and scientists who did research on tuberculosis here at the beginning of the 20
th century.
This region was a popular place for well-to-do people who suffered from tuberculosis to go to be treated, as the severely cold mountain winters made it easier for their ravaged lungs to breathe.
An investigation of their website told stories of Dr. Trudeau, who was sent a translation of Robert Koch’s original paper on the tubercle bacillus, their difficulties in keeping the incubators warm in the -20 degree winter weather, and how a wealthy benefactor rebuilt the original lab after it burned to the ground.
Reading about all this got me wondering if my own laboratory had a story, for I am the director of the Greenwich Department of Health Laboratory (
Connecticut,
USA). I decided to investigate and see what I could come up with for the 125
th anniversary of the department this year (2012).
The department director gave me some old reports to the State and an annual report for 1929.
I was reading this on the train during my morning commute and a fellow town employee remarked that I must be pretty desperate to be reading annual reports for fun.
I explained what I was doing, and he pointed me to the finance department, which has a complete collection of town annual reports going back to the Civil War.
And this became the backbone of a research report telling the story of my laboratory.
I was assisted by the good librarians of the Yale University Medical Historical Library, the Greenwich Public Library, and the State Library Historical Collection.
I found that I was the twelfth lab director, and that many of my predecessors had the good grace to die in
Greenwich.
This is important because their obituaries are indexed in the town library.
Descendents of former lab directors contributed photos and information. I tried to find something interesting to say about each lab director as a person.
There remains only one about whom I am clueless.
In telling the story of the laboratory, I realized that it parallels the development of public health in America. Every significant development in public health was reflected in the work of the Greenwich Department of Health Laboratory, so that became the way I decided to structure my story. Then end result of all this is a research report entitled “The Story of a Laboratory- The Greenwich Department of Health Laboratory and the Unfolding of Public Health in America from the 19th to the 21st Centuries”, and it traces the progress from the bacteriological revolution through the rise of environmentalism to the response to bioterrorism, and everything in between. I have created a slide show that I hope to present to the community, and now this blog, in which I hope to share laboratory stories from the past and the present. All the stories are true- the documentation of the facts follows each story, and the full bibliography is at the end of the research report. I took liberties in describing the conversations and feelings of the characters. For the straight-up historical narrative and analysis, see "The Story of a Laboratory-...". I will upload its 55 pages to this site as soon as I can figure out how to do it. In the meantime, copies are available free for the asking at the Greenwich Department of Health Laboratory, located in the Greenwich Town Hall, 101 Field Point Road, Greenwich, CT 06830.
Sometimes you can learn a lot by turning off your planned route.
Doug Serafin, MS. MPH
Director, Greenwich Department of Health Laboratory
Note: This blog is a personal project of Mr. Serafin and is not officially connected with the Town of Greenwich.
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