es and inescapable percentages exactly how many of the race were
killed by it. It is one of the striking illustrations of the advantages
of good bookkeeping. Boards and departments of health had just fairly
got on their feet and started an accurate system of state accounts in
matters of deaths and births. We were beginning to recognize national
health as an asset, and to scrutinize its fluctuations with keen
interest accordingly.

We may decry statistics as much as we like, but when we see the effects
of a disease set down in cold columns of black and white we have no
longer any idea of submitting to it as inevitable. We are going to get
right up and do some fighting. "One-seventh of all the deaths" has
literally become the war cry of our new Holy War against tuberculosis.
Still another stirring phrase of inestimable value in rousing us from
our torpor was that coined by the brilliant and lovable
physician-philosopher, Oliver Wendell Holmes: "The Great White Plague of
the North." This vivid epithet, abused as it may have been in later
years, was of enormous service in fixing the public mind on consumption
as a definite, individual disease, something to be fought and guarded
against. Before that, we had been inclined to look upon it as just a
natural failing of the vital forces, a thing that came from within, and
was in no sense caused from without. The fair young girl, or the
delicate boy whose vitality was hardly sufficient to carry him through
the stern battle of life, under some slight shock, or even mental
disappointment, would sink into a decline, gradually waste away, and
die. What could be done in such a case, except to bow in submission to
the inscrutable ways of Providence?

It seems incredible now, but such was the light in which smallpox was
regarded by physicians of the Arabian and mediaeval schools: a natural
oozing forth of "peccant humors" in the blood of the young, a
disagreeable, but perfectly natural, and even necessary, process. For if
the patient did not get rid of these humors either he would die or his
growth would be seriously impaired. Now smallpox has become little more
than a memory in civilization, and consumption is due to follow its
example.

Sanitary pioneers had already begun casting about eagerly for light upon
the influence of housing, of drainage, of food, in the causation of
tuberculosis, when a new and powerful weapon was suddenly placed in
their hands by the infant science of bact