Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/354

350 am sure ninety-nine hundredths of the medical profession regard as an unproven and in its present shape improbable hypothesis, and throwing cold water on the sanatorial treatment of consumption which, I believe the great mass of the medical profession regard as a valuable addition to our means of contending with that malady. Dr. Maudsley deplored the want of sobriety in some medical statements on the popular platform, in consequence of which the public has jumped to the conclusion that because the bacillus has been discovered phthisis is curable, the old notions of its heredity erroneous, the objection to phthisical marriages obsolete, and the right thing to do forthwith to dot the land with sanatoriums for which, he concludes, not more can be said than for sensible treatment before their invention.

Now, I have made and listened to a good many medical statements on popular platforms respecting tuberculosis, but I have never become conscious of the insobriety which has shocked Dr. Maudsley. On every occasion, three factors in the etiology of phthisis—the seed, the soil and the surroundings—have been fully recognized, and while emphasis has been properly laid upon the seed as the primary and essential cause of the disease, due weight has been given to the greater or less resistance of the living tissues in which the seed is sown, and to the more or less favorable nature of the environment during its germination and growth. Dr. Maudsley is the apostle of heredity and of temperament—matters of great moment—but I do not know of any hereditary predisposition or temperamental condition that will make a man proof against a sufficient dose of arsenic or strychnia, and we have no evidence that there is any that will make him immune to a sufficient dose of the tubercle bacillus of sufficient virulence introduced into his system. The resistance, to the implantation of the bacillus and to its spread and propagation, varies greatly. In some habits of body it will scarce take root; in others it springs up rapidly and flourishes luxuriantly, but congeniality of the soil is a very different thing from hereditary transmission, and there is no kind of inherited constitution or temperament in which in the absence of the seed tuberculosis can be developed. The bacillus has its heredity, as well as its animal or human victim, and it is possible that the occasional failure of its attacks may be due, not so much to the stoutness of the resistance offered, as to the feebleness of the assistants, the descendants of an attenuated stock.

Dr. Maudsley says, 'no one thinking clearly ever thought that actual tubercle may be inherited,' but in saying so he must, for a moment, have lost his wonted lucidity of thought, for Professor Bang has demonstrated that the tubercle bacillus has been found in the livers of the new-born calves of tubercular cows. This mode of transmission of the disease is, however, so rare that it may be ignored, and as it is certain