Dr. Trudeau, ever in the grip of the enemy that could be held at bay, but never conquered, labored year after year to save the lives of others. Many he was able to cure through rest and the life-giving air of the place he had found and made to be the battle-ground against tuberculosis. In many more he succeeded in arresting the disease and giving years of useful life, with restrictions—days and nights in the open, eternal watchfulness. And always, so conditioned himself, he worked, while often laboring for every breath he drew, to find the real cure—a something that would be able to destroy the terrible germs. He never lived to find it, but he prepared the way for others, who will go on with his work and carry it to success.
Shortly before his death, in November, 1915, Dr. Trudeau tried to explain what the statue “Gloria Victis” had meant to him:
“It typifies,” he said, “many victories I have seen won in Saranac Lake by those whom I had learned to love; the victory of the spirit over the body; the victories that demand acquiescence in worldly failure, and in the supreme sacrifice of life itself as a part of their achievement; the victory of the Nazarene, which ever speaks its great message to the ages.”
“THE PROPHET-ENGINEER”: GEORGE WASHINGTON GOETHALS
A man went down to Panama,
Where many a man had died,
To slit the sliding mountains
And lift the eternal tide:
A man stood up in Panama,
And the mountains stood aside.
Percy Mac Kaye.
WHEN a boy has a name like George Washington Goethals he must have something out of the ordinary about him to let it pass with his companions on the playground. Should he prove a weakling, should the other boys discover any flaw in the armor of his self-confidence, such a name would be a mockery and a misfortune.
Is there any one who cannot recall certain rarely uncomfortable moments of his childhood when he wished that the fates had provided him with a Christian name that the other chaps couldn’t send back and forth like a shuttlecock, with a new derisive turn at each toss? One expects to endure a certain amount of “Georgie Porgie” nonsense, which has the excuse of rime if not of reason, but when one also has a last name that nobody ever heard of before, he finds himself wishing sometimes that he had been born a Johnson or a Smith.