nate malady; that many of
them, while able to preserve good health under ideal conditions, were
markedly and often distressingly limited in the range of their business
activities for years after, and even for life. Finally, that as these
cases were followed further and further, it was found that even after
becoming cured they were sadly liable to relapse under some unexpected
strain, or to slacken their vigilance and drop back into their former
bad physical habits; while the conviction began to grow steadily upon
men who had devoted one, two, or more decades to the study of this
disease in the localities most resorted to for its cure, that the
general vigor and vitality of these cured consumptives were apt to be
not of the best; that their duration of life was not equal to the
average; and that, even if they escaped a return of the disease, they
were apt to go down before their normal time under the attack of some
other malady. In short, _cure_ was a poor weapon against the disease as
compared with _prevention_.

But before this, a careful study of the enemy's position and
investigation of our own resources had brought another most important
and reassuring fact to light, and that is, that while a distressingly
large number of persons died of tuberculosis, these represented only a
comparatively small percentage of all who had actually been attacked by
the disease. One of the reasons why consumption had come to be regarded
as such a deadly disease was that the milder cases of it were never
recognized. It was, and is yet, a common phrase in the mouths of both
the laity and of the medical profession: "He was seriously threatened
with consumption"; "She came very near falling into a decline,"--_but_
they recovered. If they didn't die of it, it wasn't "real" tuberculosis.
Now we have changed all that, and have even begun to go to the opposite
extreme, of declaring with the German experts, "_Jeder Mann ist am ende
ein bischen tuberkuloese_." (Every one is some time or another a little
bit tuberculous.) This sounds appalling at first hearing, but as a
matter of fact it is immensely encouraging. Our first suspicion of it
came from the records of that gruesome, but pricelessly valuable,
treasure-house of solid facts in pathology--the post-mortem room, the
dead-house. Systematic examinations of all the bodies brought to autopsy
in our great hospitals and elsewhere revealed at first thirty, then, as
the investigation became more mi