completely wiped out, or at least robbed of its
possibilities for harm. When this is done, at least two-thirds of all
cases of deafness, more than half of all cases of arrested development,
and three-fourths of those of backwardness in children will disappear.

CHAPTER VI

TUBERCULOSIS, A SCOTCHED SNAKE

I

One of the darling habits of humanity is to discover that we are facing
a crisis. One could safely offer a large prize for a group of ten
commencement orations, or political platforms, at least a third of which
did not announce this momentous fact. Either we are facing it or it
confronts us, and unutterable things will happen unless we "gird up our
loins," and vote the right ticket. An interesting feature about these
loudly heralded crises is that they hardly ever "crise." The real crisis
either strikes us so hard that we never know what hit us, or is over
before we recognize that anything was going to happen. And most of our
reflections about it are after ones--trying to explain what caused it.
In fact, in public affairs, as in medicine, a crisis is a sign of
recovery. Its occurrence is an indication that nature is preparing to
throw off the disease. Nowhere is this truth more vividly illustrated
than in the tuberculosis situation. When, about thirty years ago, the
world began to awake from its stupor of centuries, and to realize that
this one great disease alone was _killing one-seventh of all people born
under civilization_, and crippling as many more; that its killed and
wounded every year cast in the shade the bloodiest wars ever waged, and
that it was apparently caused by the civilization which it ravaged,--no
wonder that we were appalled at the outlook.

Here was a disease of civilization, caused by the conditions of that
civilization. Could it be cured without destroying its cause and
reverting to barbarism? Yet this very apprehension was a sign of hope, a
promise of improvement. That we were able to feel it was a sign that we
were shaking off the old fatalistic attitude toward disease,--as
inevitable or an act of Providence. It was brought about by the more
accurate and systematic study of disease. We had long been sadly
familiar with the fact that death by consumption, by "slow decline," by
"wasting" or "slow fever," was frightfully common. "To fall into a
decline" and die was one of the standard commonplaces of romantic
literature. But that was quite different from knowing in cold, hard
figur