In
other words, the white blood cells won their fight.

This knowledge is of great value; it taught the scientists who were
studying the characteristics of the disease that there were conditions,
possible of attainment, under which the human organism could definitely
and victoriously defeat the invasion of the tubercle bacilli.

The public mind, until recently, was imbued with the fallacy that the
disease was hereditary. It was thought that if it "ran in the family"
the victims of it were almost certain to die. We know definitely now
that consumption is not hereditary, and that, instead of death being
certain in a patient in whose family it has been, this fact alone
ensures the victim a much better prospect of cure than if it had never
existed in the family. The explanation of this seeming paradox is quite
logical from a medical standpoint. The theory of the vaccine treatment
of disease is that if you infuse into the blood the products of the
germs of certain diseases, the individual in whose blood the vaccine has
been put, will wholly resist that particular disease, or if he acquires
it, it will be in a mild and more modified form. If a family for a
number of generations has had various members die of tuberculosis, the
blood stream of the family will have become so impregnated with the
toxins, or poisons, of the disease, that, in time, a certain immunity
will have been established. Consequently, tuberculosis in an individual,
the blood of whose ancestors has been accustomed or habituated to the
poison of the disease, will run a milder course, be more modified in its
type, and will respond to treatment easier than in an individual whose
family history is free from the taint of tuberculosis.

In proof of this principle, it is a well-known fact that consumption
runs a rapid, fatal course among those nations which have not hitherto
been exposed to it. The death rate among our American Indians when it
was first introduced among them was enormous.

The same truth applies to syphilis. The blood of the civilized race has
become so thoroughly syphilized, that it is no longer so susceptible to
the disease as it once was: and the disease as we know it to-day does
not manifest the same virulency as it did years ago, or as it does in a
race in whom it is grafted for the first time.

These ideas of the curability of the disease and of its non-heredity are
extremely important and supremely suggestive. Tuberculosis takes only
th