ases the cough may require some sedative remedy,
especially if it disturbs the patient at night. Experience has taught
us, however, that to live twelve hours in the open air and to sleep with
the windows wide open, will do more for the cough than any medicine we
possess.

Pleuritic complications may cause pain, but this feature is best aided
and permanently relieved by fresh air also. Very recently there were
made exhaustive experiments in this connection in St. Thomas' Hospital,
London, England. It was decided to subject patients to open-air tests
for pleuritic pains in the course of consumption. This particular
hospital is situated on the River Thames, in a notoriously damp and
foggy part of the city; despite this drawback it was conclusively shown
that the patients who lived night and day on the balconies breathing
this heavy, murky, damp atmosphere, were relieved of their pains
quicker, and more permanently, than those who were shielded in the wards
of the hospital.

Inasmuch as the patient must be adequately nourished, his cure depends
upon the condition of the stomach. It is known that the germ works more
actively in a patient who is losing weight. When the germ is very
active, its poisons, circulating in the blood, cause fever and fever
results in tissue waste. We must therefore bend every effort toward
overcoming this tendency. If we can get the patient to take sufficient
food and if he digests it thoroughly, the weight will increase, the
fever will subside, and the tissue waste will stop. Patients must be
extremely careful, therefore, what they put into their stomachs. Only
simple, tasty, highly nutritious food should be taken, and digestive
energy should not be wasted on less nutritious materials. For this
reason incalculable harm has been done by indiscriminate
medicine-taking. Medicines exert a bad influence on the stomach and
those patients who take them lose their appetites. Drugs should never be
taken except for a definite purpose and only on the advice of a
physician. These patients should particularly be guarded against the use
of advertised patent medicines. They are always bad, and never under any
circumstances are they of any advantage, as is clearly shown in the
chapter on "Patent Medicines." Thousands of persons die of consumption
every year who would have lived had they not taken such remedies.

The following article is sent out by the New York Department of Health
as a Circular of Instruction