nute and skillful, forty, sixty,
seventy-five per cent of scars in the apices of the lungs, remains of
healed cavities, infected glands, or other signs of an invasion by the
tubercle bacillus. Of course, the skeptic challenged very properly at
once:--

"But how do you know that these masses of chalky-material, these
enlarged glands, are the result of tuberculosis? They may be due to some
half-dozen other infections."

Almost before the question was asked a test was made by the troublesome
but convincing method of cutting open these scars, dividing these
enlarged glands, scraping materials out of their centre, and injecting
them into guinea pigs. Result: from thirty to seventy per cent of the
guinea pigs died of tuberculosis. In other cases it was not necessary to
inoculate, as scrapings or sections from these scar-masses showed
tubercle bacilli, clearly recognizable by their staining reaction.

Here, then, we have indisputable evidence of the fact that the tubercle
bacillus may not only enter some of the openings of the body,--the
nostrils, the mouth, the lungs,--but may actually form a lodgment and a
growth-colony in the lungs themselves, and yet be completely defeated by
the antitoxic powers of the blood and other tissues of the body,
prevented from spreading throughout the rest of the lung, most of the
invaders destroyed, and the crippled remnants imprisoned for life in the
interior of a fibroid or chalky mass.

It gave one a distinct shock at the meeting of the British Medical
Association devoted to tuberculosis, some ten years ago, to hear Sir
Clifford Allbutt, one of the most brilliant and eminent physicians of
the English-speaking world, remark, on opening his address, "Probably
most of us here have had tuberculosis and recovered from it."

Here is evidently an asset of greatest and most practical value, which
changes half the face of the field. Instead of saving, as best we may,
from half to two-thirds of those who have allowed the disease to get the
upper hand and begin to overrun their entire systems, it places before
us the far more cheering task of building up and increasing this natural
resisting power of the human body, until not merely seventy per cent of
all who are attacked by it will throw it off, but eighty, eighty-five,
ninety! We can plan to stop _consumption by preventing the consumptive_.
A very small additional percentage of vigor or of resisting power--such
as could be produced by but a sli