e quitters and the supine. Anyone who will fight bravely against the
disease can always resist its ravages for many years, if not to the
extent of living out a normal life.

THE TENDENCY TO DISEASE.--Mothers should understand just what is meant
by "the tendency to disease." We assert that consumption is not
hereditary, but we know that certain individuals are born with the
tendency to tuberculosis. Just what does this mean?

Let us suppose a tubercular mother gives birth to a child. It would be
foolish to assume that this child comes into the world with a normal
standard of resistance; but it is certain he is not tubercular and
doomed at the moment of his birth. He may be what is ordinarily termed
a weak, puny, sickly infant, but the germ of disease is not implanted in
his constitution. If he is taken from his mother, taken away from the
tubercular environment, and brought up under the best hygienic and
sanitary surroundings, it is possible for him to become a robust,
healthy, normal man.

The tendency to disease in this case will not materialize. If, however,
we permit him to remain with his tubercular mother, to nurse her milk,
to live in what necessarily is an unhygienic and unsalutary
environment--the presence of the consumptive mother renders it so--the
probability is that the tendency to disease, which in his case is the
tendency to weak lungs, will materialize, because of his weak
resistance, poor nourishment, and unfavorable surroundings. If,
therefore, his method of living does not contribute to building up and
strengthening what is in the first place a weak structure, the structure
itself will, during the first strain put upon it, give way, and
naturally the weak spot will be the point of election for the invasion
of disease. This strain may be one of the infantile diseases,--scarlet
fever, or measles, or whooping cough, or it may be bronchitis. Instead
of convalescing from these conditions, as a normally constituted child
will, this child, whose potential resistance is below standard, will
fail to reach the rallying point, will afford a fertile field for germ
invasion, and will develop tuberculosis,--not directly, however, as a
result of having had a tubercular mother, but because he was not removed
from the tubercular environment and given a fair chance. The high infant
mortality is, to a very large extent, caused directly by this "tendency
to disease," plus unfavorable environment, and this is wherein the