is no reason to shrink from association with
tuberculous persons. We have learned, too, that consumption in one's
progenitors, immediate or remote, hardly makes it even probable that he
himself is doomed to suffer with it; the only tuberculous heredity that
we now recognize is that of defective ability to withstand the
infection, and even this we regard as in most instances readily
surmountable. We have learned, furthermore, that pulmonary tuberculous
disease is by no means so fatal as it was formerly esteemed, for men
whose business it is to make great numbers of post-mortem examinations,
such as coroners' physicians and hospital pathologists, assure us that
in a very large percentage of cases of death from other causes they find
indubitable signs of past tuberculous disease of the lungs which had
ceased its activity--been, in fact, cured, either spontaneously or by
medical intervention. Such intervention, it has been abundantly proved,
is altogether likely to be successful if it is of the right sort and
employed early. There is, to be sure, no cure-all. Powerful as the
climatic treatment is, it must be supplemented by measures accurately
adapted to the individual case, and failure to comprehend this fact
still leads many a phthisical person to his grave. But information is
rapidly being diffused, sanatoria for such of the tuberculous as can
take advantage of them are multiplying, and those who are shut off from
their aid are growing more and more cognizant of how they should live in
order to give themselves the best chance of recovery and save their
associates from infection. The era of consumption-cures--meaning
drugs--is past; but the disease is cured in an ever-increasing
proportion of instances, and that, too, by medical though not
medicinal measures.

At almost every turn medicine has been powerfully assisted by the
sciences which should rather be termed correlative than subsidiary.
Notable among them is chemistry. The isolation of the active principles
of medicinal plants--such as morphine, quinine, strychnine, and
cocaine--has been a remarkable service rendered by chemistry to
medicine. How should we be handicapped if we still had to fight
malarial disease with the crude Peruvian bark instead of its chief
alkaloid, quinine! And how impracticable if not impossible would it be
to render the eye insensitive to pain with any extract of coca leaves,
no matter how concentrated--a purpose that we accomplish almost
in