Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/480

470 of tuberculosis the opinion that it is hereditary, whereas its transmission in the cases in question was due solely to the simplest processes of infection, which do not strike people so much because the consequences do not appear at once, but generally only after the lapse of years.

Often in such circumstances the infection is not restricted to a single family, but spreads in densely inhabited tenement houses to the neighbors, and then, as the admirable investigations of Biggs have shown in the case of the densely peopled parts of New York, regular nests or foci of disease are formed. But if one investigates these matters more thoroughly one finds that it is not poverty per se that favors tuberculosis, but the bad domestic conditions under which the poor everywhere, but especially in great cities, have to live. For, as the German statistics show, tuberculosis is less frequent, even among the poor, when the population is not densely packed together, and may attain very great dimensions among a well-to-do population when the domestic conditions, especially as regards the bedrooms, are bad, as is the case, for instance, among the inhabitants of the North Sea coast. So it is the overcrowded dwellings of the poor that we have to regard as the real breeding-places of tuberculosis; it is out of them that the disease always crops up anew, and it is to the abolition of these conditions that we must first and foremost direct our attention if we wish to attack the evil at its root and to wage war against it with effective weapons. This being so, it is very gratifying to see how efforts are being made in almost all countries to improve the domestic conditions of the poor. I am also convinced that these efforts, which must be promoted in every way, will lead to a considerable diminution of tuberculosis. But a long time must elapse ere essential changes can be effected in this direction, and much may be done meanwhile in order to reach the goal much more rapidly.

If we are not able at present to get rid of the danger which small and overcrowded dwellings involve, all we can do is to remove the patients from them and, in their own interests and that of the people about them, to lodge them better, and this can be done only in suitable hospitals. But the thought of attaining this end by compulsion of any kind is very far from me; what I want is that they may be enabled to obtain the nursing they need better than they can obtain it now. At present a consumptive in an advanced stage of the disease is regarded as incurable and as an unsuitable inmate for a hospital. The consequence is that he is reluctantly admitted and dismissed as soon as possible. The patient, too, when the treatment seems to him to produce no improvement and the expenses, owing to the long duration of his illness, weigh heavily upon him, is himself animated by the wish to leave the hospital soon. That would be altogether altered if