ization,
including the infectious diseases. For years we never dreamed of even
attempting to raise any levies among these border tribes of more than
doubtful loyalty. Indeed, they were supposed to be our open enemies.

When we first attempted to take a world-view of tuberculosis, the first
great fact that stood out plainly was that it was emphatically a disease
of the walled town and the city; that the savage and the nomad barbarian
were practically free from it; that range cattle and barnyard fowls
seldom fell victims to it, while their housed and confined cousins in
the dairy barn and the breeding-pens suffered frightfully. It was one of
our commonplace sayings that we must "get back to nature," get away from
the walled city into the open country, revert from the conditions of
civilization in a considerable degree to those of barbarism, in order to
escape. While, as for heredity, its influence was almost dead against
us. How could a race be exposed to a disease like tuberculosis,
generation after generation, without having its vital resistance
impaired?

But a marked and cheering change has come over our attitude to this wing
of the battle of life. So far from regarding it as in any sense
necessary to revert to barbarism, still less to savagery, for either
the prevention or the cure of disease, we have discovered by the most
convincing, practical experience, that we can, in the first place, with
the assistance of the locomotive and trolley, combined with modern
building skill and sanitary knowledge, put even our city-dwellers under
conditions, in both home and workshop, which will render them far less
likely to contract tuberculosis than if they were in a peasant's cottage
or _the average farmhouse or merchant's house_ of a hundred years ago,
to say nothing of the cave, the dugout, or the hut of the savage.

In the second place, instead of simply "going back to nature" and living
in brush-shelters on what we can catch or shoot, it takes _all the
resources of civilization_ to place our open-air patients in the ideal
conditions for their recovery. Let any consumptive be reckless enough to
"go back to nature," unencircled by the strong arm of civilized
intelligence and power, and unprotected by her sanitary shield, and
nature will kill him three times out of five. There could not be a more
dangerous delusion than the all-too-common one--that all that is
necessary for the cure of consumption is to turn the victim loose