Lucius Rüedi

Lucius Rüedi was a Swiss physician from Graubünden who is remembered as a pioneer of climatotherapy for lung disease. He worked as a district doctor, first at Davos in the periods 1828 to 1830 and 1835 to 1848, and from the summer of 1848 at Alvaneu. In a letter of May 1844 to the Zürich spa physician Conrad Meyer-Ahrens he reported that children with tuberculosis of varying severity had been sent home cured, with nothing but scars in the lung, after he treated them in the high Alpine climate. The finding challenged the prevailing belief that the thin, cold air of the mountains would overstimulate and ruin the lung, a belief that led physicians to send well-off patients to warm regions such as the Italian and French Riviera or Egypt. Rüedi married Rahel Conrad and they had eight children; several of his sons also became physicians, the best known being Carl, who treated the author Robert Louis Stevenson in the winters of 1880 to 1881 and 1881 to 1882. Rüedi died in 1870 at Alvaneu.