When my family and friends learned that I was going to get out of the bed in which I had lain for three-and-a-half years, and go off into the woods and live in a tent on the shore of a remote pond they were shocked and incredulous. But three years of bed rest and as many operations had done nothing for my lungs, and I chose, now, rather than undergo a still more serious operation, which the doctors were labelling my "last chance," to risk a summer in the open; for though I was city born and bred, a simple life in the woods held a strong appeal for me. . .
I wish I could say that I was cured of tuberculosis during my second summer in the woods, but the truth is I never knew when this came about. It was more than ten years after I first went into the woods before I had an x-ray taken or had a medical examination of any kind. These tests confirmed what I already guess -- that I no longer had tuberculosis.
The wilderness did more than heal my lungs, however. While it dwarfed me by its immensity and made me conscious of my insignificance, it made me aware of the importance of being an individual, capable of thinking and feeling not what was expected of me, but only what my own reasoning told me was true. It taught me fortitude and self-reliance, and with its tranquility it bestowed upon me something which would sustain me as long as I lived; a sense of the freshness and the wonder which life in natural surroundings daily brings and a joy in the freedom and beauty and peace that exist in a world apart from human beings.
- Martha Reben, The Healing Woods (1952), from the first and last pages of the book. Dying of tuberculosis, Reben met a guide who took her to a remote island in the Adirondacks where she lived alone in a tent.