13/01/2018
Liberty, Ny
RETROSPECT
by John Conway
January 12, 2018
VON UNRUH AND HIS CURE HEAD ELSEWHERE
It was the middle of January of 1917, and amidst a world at war, Dr. Victor von Unruh, a New York City physician with a promising new treatment for tuberculosis, was searching for a new site for a sanatorium he envisioned as a cornerstone in dispensing the treatment.
His plans to renovate the old Walnut Mountain House in Liberty into the innovative facility had just been ignominiously shot down by the Liberty Town Board, causing him to withdraw his application to the State Health Commission.
The Loomis Memorial Sanitarium for Consumptives had opened in Liberty in 1896, and had become almost immediately successful, its burgeoning reputation soon leading to a number of spin-off operations near-by. Before long, the Liberty area was known more for its tuberculosis treatment facilities than for the grand hotels that once prospered there. While most of these smaller facilities offered their patients nothing more than supervised rest and the curative mountain air, others, such as the Liberty Homeopathic Sanitarium for Consumptives run by Dr. Howard Percy Deady, offered radically different approaches to treating the disease.
None of the purported cures, though, was as innovative as that being studied by Dr. von Unruh, an Eclectic physician– the Eclectics were a segment of the medical profession specializing in cures derived from natural plant sources– who spent years studying the effectiveness of the plant derivative Echinacea on the disease.
By 1916, the Loomis facility had become among the most famous in America, but its negative impact on the county’s tourism industry could no longer be disputed. In November of that year, with the prosperity of the county’s Silver Age of tourism just a memory, Dr. von Unruh’s corporation made a tempting proposal to create on Walnut Mountain a grand facility on the scale of the nearby Loomis operation, in order to dispense the cure he claimed had arrested 100% of incipient cases and up to 80% of more advanced, severe cases of tuberculosis in five years of studies.
"In the treatment of tuberculosis I employ a compound of two vegetable drugs - Echinacea angustifolia and inula helenium," von Unruh wrote in the National Eclectic Medical Association Quarterly in September, 1915. "This compound I administer by intramuscular injections, daily, or as frequently as tolerated. No general or local toxic reactions of any kind have ever resulted.
"In all, 98 cases were treated by me with this remedy; of these, 21 are under treatment at present. Both glandular cases were cured. In incipient pulmonary cases, 100 per cent of cures were obtained. Some of these cases recovered very rapidly within two to six weeks, while in others it was necessary to continue treatment for from two to four months before a cure or an arrest of the disease was effected."
Von Unruh’s statistics must have seemed incredible in light of the fact that the medical profession was just beginning to understand what caused tuberculosis and had yet to devise an accepted cure. In fact, many members of the medical profession regarded his claims as preposterous and unsupported, and looked upon the Echinacea cure with about as much respect as that accorded the popular old Sullivan County mountain remedy for consumption-- that of ingesting rattlesnake hearts while they were still beating.
Battle lines had also been drawn by that time between the Allopaths of the American Medical Association and the Homeopaths and Eclectics, who mostly rejected the notion that cures came exclusively from the use of pharmaceuticals. So the deck was stacked against von Unruh when he appeared before the Liberty Town Board in October of 1916 to pitch his plan.
“If the plans of the promoters materialize, a high class and scientifically conducted sanatorium for tuberculosis patients may be established on the Walnut Mountain property about two miles west of Liberty,” the Liberty Register reported in an article in its October 20, 1916 edition headlined “High Class Health Institution Wins Approval of Liberty Business Men’s Association.”
The Register reported that that the Town Board “had considered the matter and was of the opinion that the application for permission to establish the sanatorium should be granted.”
Although the Board initially thought the proposal was a godsend, perfectly timed to rekindle a sagging economy, they seemed to reverse course in light of growing opposition from the Liberty business community, which although previously embracing the idea, united in vehement opposition.
Specialists from Dr. Edward Trudeau’s renowned treatment facility at Saranac Lake and doctors from New York - and from the Loomis Sanatorium, too - testified that the "von Unruh cure" was unproven and unscientific.
This was especially ironic in that millions of dollars in public and private monies were being invested in the construction of sanitariums to dispense the "rest cure" without a single clinical study ever having been conducted to demonstrate its efficacy.
Several locals called the Echinacea cure a fake and compared it to “patent medicines.” The few local resort operators who remained in business in the vicinity after the stigma the Loomis facility had brought to Liberty, also voiced their opposition to von Unruh’s plan.
With so much apparent opposition, the von Unruh people withdrew their application. A headline in the Liberty Register on January 12, 1917, announced that "Dr. von Unruh and His ‘Cure’ Head Elsewhere."
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John Conway is the Sullivan County Historian. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. At 6 p.m. on Thursday, January 18 he will present a program entitled “Martin Luther King at The Concord” at the Crawford Public Library in Monticello. The program is free and open to the public.
PHOTO CAPTION: The Walnut Mountain House in its heyday in the late 19th Century. The shuttered hotel was the proposed location of a new tuberculosis sanatorium in 1916, but the Liberty community rallied against it.
