PAUL SMITHS - The balsam-scented air in the Adirondacks didn't heal tuberculosis patients a century ago, and today's medical therapies will appear backward through a similar historical lens, novelist Andrea Barrett said.
Her husband, Barry Goldstein, an X-ray crystallographer, cited poisoning by chemotherapy and burning with radiation to treat cancer as an example.
“Everything looks barbaric 100 years later,” said Barrett, whose focus is historical science, most recently in this fall's “The Air We Breathe,” set at a North Country sanitarium in 1916. “I'm trying not to judge it from our perspective.”
Barrett, who left graduate studies in zoology in the 1970s, rejects the idea that she breathes life into dusty subjects.
“I love the intersection of people and science,” she said. “I love the heads of people that make science. I like to watch them, watch them thinking, talk to them while they're doing it. It's really interesting to me.”
At Paul Smith's College in the northern Adirondacks, where almost 100 people turned out on a recent snow-swept evening to hear Barrett read the first chapter, she was asked about the apocryphal healing scent of balsam. She researched the old TB clinics in nearby Saranac Lake and elsewhere starting a decade ago, tracking down books, accounts, photographs and documents of the day.
“People did say that here, but it wasn't ever true,” Barrett said, adding the scent has a long association with disinfectants. “Maybe those smells we associated with freshness and health. ... But it doesn't heal tuberculosis at all. It just makes you feel cleaner.”
Tall, bespectacled, with a mane of white hair, Barrett and her husband began coming to these mountains in the 1970s to ski, hike, climb, kayak and camp, but they never lived here full time. She made a point to not write about specific Adirondack locales residents know well, but instead invented places and characters to stand in for others, in this case the fictional village of Tamarack Lake, against the backdrop of impending World War I, currents of socialism and xenophobia and the emerging science of radiology.
“I started noticing the porches in Saranac Lake and started wondering who was on the porches,” Barrett said, explaining the seed of the book. Patients rested on the broad porches, resting and breathing the clean mountain air.
Antibiotics wouldn't appear for nearly 30 years to effectively treat tuberculosis, a.k.a consumption, the affliction caused by bacteria and spread by coughing and sneezing. But the cleanliness, enforced rest and adequate nutrition at sanitariums did promote healing while isolating the sick and helping limit the spread of disease.
In an early scene, Barrett described the dated diagnosis.
“Your lungs,” Dr. Petrie said, his gaze averted while he counted the beats of Leo's heart, “have little pockets of infection scattered through them, which your body is trying to wall off.
“If you move suddenly, or take a deep breath or stretch your arm - like you just did, when you reached for your pillow: don't do that - you break the scar tissue and let the germs escape. And then you make new spots of disease, and we have to start all over again. You seem like an intelligent man. Can't you understand that?”
Pockets of germs do encyst like that. But anti-tubercular drugs now kill the bacteria and are more effective in preventing the infection from spreading than resting the lungs. It wasn't bad science for the time, Barrett said.
The novel's X-ray technician, a woman, wears a purple glove on her left hand and has “angry sores” on her right, suffering to do her work.
Often the details of her research, especially arcana from previous periods and other sciences, exceed what he knows, said Goldstein, now a photographer following a career in biophysics.
Winner of the National Book Award for the story collection “Ship Fever” in 1996, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2003 for “Servants of the Map,” winner of a 2001 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, or five-year “genius grant,” Barrett, a halftime lecturer at Williams College, lives in the Berkshires in North Adams, Mass., where she also takes the dog on long walks, swims in lakes and ponds in summer, and writes.
She grew up on Cape Cod, with attendant interest in marine biology, and had “a great science teacher” in high school. She got a bachelor's degree in biology from Union College in 1974, part of only the second class of women at the Schenectady school. She very briefly studied zoology and later medieval and reformation history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
“I don't like doing science. I was horrible at it,” Barrett said after the reading. “But I love, love, love reading about it, reading about people doing it.”
“I lived with a working scientist for 25 years and a great many of our friends are scientists, some at a quite serious level,” Barrett said. “So that's what I know about scientists' lives, what they want and how they fight with each other.”
It took her 10 years working at minimum-wage jobs in places like a box factory, greenhouse and dental surgeon's office, and four earlier novels before she found the intersection of science and literature. “That happened late. I was almost 40,” she said.
This spring, Barrett, now 53, will teach a course called “Imagining Scientists,” reading works by and about evolution theorist Charles Darwin and genetics pioneer James Watson, examining how scientists themselves, journalists and others write about them and their work and how that shapes the understanding of them.
---
On the Net:
Adirondack Center for Writing: http://www.adirondackcenterforwriting.org/
Williams College: http://www.williams.edu
AP-ES-12-13-07 1603EST
“Everything looks barbaric 100 years later,” said Barrett, whose focus is historical science, most recently in this fall's “The Air We Breathe,” set at a North Country sanitarium in 1916. “I'm trying not to judge it from our perspective.”
Barrett, who left graduate studies in zoology in the 1970s, rejects the idea that she breathes life into dusty subjects.
“I love the intersection of people and science,” she said. “I love the heads of people that make science. I like to watch them, watch them thinking, talk to them while they're doing it. It's really interesting to me.”
At Paul Smith's College in the northern Adirondacks, where almost 100 people turned out on a recent snow-swept evening to hear Barrett read the first chapter, she was asked about the apocryphal healing scent of balsam. She researched the old TB clinics in nearby Saranac Lake and elsewhere starting a decade ago, tracking down books, accounts, photographs and documents of the day.
“People did say that here, but it wasn't ever true,” Barrett said, adding the scent has a long association with disinfectants. “Maybe those smells we associated with freshness and health. ... But it doesn't heal tuberculosis at all. It just makes you feel cleaner.”
Tall, bespectacled, with a mane of white hair, Barrett and her husband began coming to these mountains in the 1970s to ski, hike, climb, kayak and camp, but they never lived here full time. She made a point to not write about specific Adirondack locales residents know well, but instead invented places and characters to stand in for others, in this case the fictional village of Tamarack Lake, against the backdrop of impending World War I, currents of socialism and xenophobia and the emerging science of radiology.
“I started noticing the porches in Saranac Lake and started wondering who was on the porches,” Barrett said, explaining the seed of the book. Patients rested on the broad porches, resting and breathing the clean mountain air.
Antibiotics wouldn't appear for nearly 30 years to effectively treat tuberculosis, a.k.a consumption, the affliction caused by bacteria and spread by coughing and sneezing. But the cleanliness, enforced rest and adequate nutrition at sanitariums did promote healing while isolating the sick and helping limit the spread of disease.
In an early scene, Barrett described the dated diagnosis.
“Your lungs,” Dr. Petrie said, his gaze averted while he counted the beats of Leo's heart, “have little pockets of infection scattered through them, which your body is trying to wall off.
“If you move suddenly, or take a deep breath or stretch your arm - like you just did, when you reached for your pillow: don't do that - you break the scar tissue and let the germs escape. And then you make new spots of disease, and we have to start all over again. You seem like an intelligent man. Can't you understand that?”
Pockets of germs do encyst like that. But anti-tubercular drugs now kill the bacteria and are more effective in preventing the infection from spreading than resting the lungs. It wasn't bad science for the time, Barrett said.
The novel's X-ray technician, a woman, wears a purple glove on her left hand and has “angry sores” on her right, suffering to do her work.
Often the details of her research, especially arcana from previous periods and other sciences, exceed what he knows, said Goldstein, now a photographer following a career in biophysics.
Winner of the National Book Award for the story collection “Ship Fever” in 1996, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2003 for “Servants of the Map,” winner of a 2001 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, or five-year “genius grant,” Barrett, a halftime lecturer at Williams College, lives in the Berkshires in North Adams, Mass., where she also takes the dog on long walks, swims in lakes and ponds in summer, and writes.
She grew up on Cape Cod, with attendant interest in marine biology, and had “a great science teacher” in high school. She got a bachelor's degree in biology from Union College in 1974, part of only the second class of women at the Schenectady school. She very briefly studied zoology and later medieval and reformation history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
“I don't like doing science. I was horrible at it,” Barrett said after the reading. “But I love, love, love reading about it, reading about people doing it.”
“I lived with a working scientist for 25 years and a great many of our friends are scientists, some at a quite serious level,” Barrett said. “So that's what I know about scientists' lives, what they want and how they fight with each other.”
It took her 10 years working at minimum-wage jobs in places like a box factory, greenhouse and dental surgeon's office, and four earlier novels before she found the intersection of science and literature. “That happened late. I was almost 40,” she said.
This spring, Barrett, now 53, will teach a course called “Imagining Scientists,” reading works by and about evolution theorist Charles Darwin and genetics pioneer James Watson, examining how scientists themselves, journalists and others write about them and their work and how that shapes the understanding of them.
---
On the Net:
Adirondack Center for Writing: http://www.adirondackcenterforwriting.org/
Williams College: http://www.williams.edu
AP-ES-12-13-07 1603EST
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