Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/484

474 by these figures is due to the first beginnings of these measures. Considerably greater success is to be expected of their further development. Biggs hopes to have got so far in five years that in the city of New York alone the annual number of deaths from tuberculosis will be 3,000 less than formerly.

Now, I do indeed believe that it will be possible to render the sanatoria considerably more efficient. If strict care be taken that only patients be admitted for whom the treatment of those establishments is well adapted and if the duration of the treatment be prolonged it will certainly be possible to cure 50 per cent, and perhaps still more. But even then, and even if the number of the sanatoria be greatly increased, the total effect will always remain but moderate. The sanatoria will never render the other measures I have mentioned superfluous. If their number becomes great, however, and if they perform their functions properly, they may materially aid the strictly sanitary measures in the conflict with tuberculosis.

If now, in conclusion, we glance back once more to what has been done hitherto for the combating of tuberculosis, and forward to what has still to be done, we are at liberty to declare with a certain satisfaction that very promising beginnings have already been made. Among these I reckon the consumption hospitals of England, the legal regulations regarding notification in Norway and Saxony, the organization created by Biggs in New York (the study and imitation of which I most urgently recommend to all municipal sanitary authorities), the sanatoria, and the instruction of the people. All that is necessary is to go on developing these beginnings, to test and, if possible, to increase their influence on the diminution of tuberculosis, and wherever anything useful has yet been done to do likewise. If we allow ourselves to be continually guided in this enterprise by the spirit of genuine preventive medical science, if we utilize the experience gained in conflict with other pestilences, and aim, with clear recognition of the purpose and resolute avoidance of wrong roads, at striking the evil at its root, then the battle against tuberculosis, which has been so energetically begun, cannot fail to have a victorious issue.