But even after the dream the beginning of the fulfillment did not occur for five or six years. He had built a house in the village. There, in that wonderful year, 1882, when Koch announced his discovery of the tubercle bacillus, Trudeau, who could not read German, received, as a Christmas present from his friend, C. M. Lea of Philadelphia, a translation of that document which the doctor termed “the most far-reaching, in its importance to the human race, of any original communication”--Koch’s _Etiology of Tuberculosis_. This was young Trudeau’s immediate inspiration. He had an “indifferent medical education,” to quote himself, “no apparatus, and no books”; and the remoteness of his surroundings had removed him from contact with medical men to whom he might apply for instruction. During brief visits to New York--sometimes at the expense of his health--he learned some of the first principles of bacteriology;--and “I taught myself the rest as best I could.” His laboratory was a little room in Saranac Lake, heated by a wood stove (there was no coal). He had a home-made thermostat heated by a kerosene lamp, and in this he succeeded in growing the tubercle bacillus, although he had to sit up o’ nights to see that the living organism was not destroyed by varying temperatures. To regulate this, he invented a little shutter arrangement which could be opened or closed. He obtained the bacillus in pure cultures, and with them repeated all Koch’s experiments. The guinea-pigs used for immunizing tests he had to keep in a hole underground which was heated by another kerosene lamp. He again proved that fresh air and natural hygiene were the deadly foes of tuberculosis, by turning loose on an island rabbits that had been inoculated with the disease. Running wild, they soon recovered; while others, similarly inoculated and kept in unhygienic places, died of the disease in a very short time. While his enthusiasm was thus running high, he built in 1884 on the side of Pisgah--on the place of the dream--a little shack which is still there and which is known among the great buildings now around it as “The Little Red.” This was the nucleus of the present vast sanitarium. He began with two patients, whom he apparently cured by making them sit all day and sleep all night practically in the open air, the windows being open, with the mercury courting the thermometer bulb. Meanwhile he himself was laboring with his cultures, his home-made thermostat, his guinea-pigs and rabbits. During the week in 1890 when Koch announced his tuberculin as a “cure” for tuberculosis, Dr. Trudeau published in the _Medical Record_ an article describing his failure to obtain any appreciable degree of immunity by injections of sterilized and filtered liquid cultures of the tubercle bacillus (tuberculin). Later experiments with Koch’s tuberculin by thousands of others proved similar failures.