higher_ civilization. Nor are these
exceptional instances. Take practically any city, state, or province in
the civilized world, which has had an adequate system of recording all
births and deaths for more than thirty years, and you will find a
decrease in the percentage of deaths from tuberculosis in that time of
from twenty to forty per cent. The city of New York's death-roll, for
instance, from tuberculosis, per one thousand living, is some
thirty-five per cent less than it was thirty years ago. So that our
fight against the disease is beginning to bear fruit already. As Osler
puts it, we run barely half the risk of dying of tuberculosis that our
parents did and barely one-fourth of that of our grandparents.

But this gratifying improvement goes deeper, and is even more
significant than this. It is, of course, only natural to expect that our
vigorous fight against the spread of the infection of the disease would
give us definite results. But the interesting feature of the situation
is that this diminution in England and in Germany, for instance, began
not merely twenty, but thirty, forty, even fifty years ago--two decades
before we even knew that tuberculosis was an infectious disease with a
contagion that could be fought.

In the case of England, for instance, we have the, at first sight,
anomalous and even improbable fact that the rate of decline in the
death-rate from tuberculosis for the twenty years preceding the
discovery of Koch's bacillus was almost as great as it has been in the
twenty years since. In other words, the general tendency, born of
civilization, toward sanitary reform, better housing, better drainage,
higher wages and consequently more abundant food, rigid inspection of
food materials, factory laws, etc., is of itself fighting against and
diminishing the prevalence of the "great white plague" by improving the
resisting power and building up the health of the individual.
Civilization is curing its own ills.

It must be remembered that vital statistics, showing the decrease of a
given disease within the past forty or fifty years, probably represent
not merely a real decrease of the amount indicated by the figures but an
even greater one in fact; because each succeeding decade, as our
knowledge of disease and the perfection of our statistical machinery
improves and increases, is sure to show a prompter recognition and a
more thorough and complete reporting of all cases of the disease
occurring. S