35o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



am sure ninety-nine hundredths of the medical profession regard as an 

 unproven and in its present shape improbable hypothesis, and throw- 

 ing cold water on the sanatorial treatment of consumption which, I 

 believe the great mass of the medical profession regard as a valuable 

 addition to our means of contending with that malady. Dr. Maudsley 

 deplored the want of sobriety in some medical statements on the pop- 

 ular platform, in consequence of which the public has jumped to the 

 conclusion that because the bacillus has been discovered phthisis is 

 curable, the old notions of its heredity erroneous, the objection to 

 phthisical marriages obsolete, and the right thing to do forthwith to 

 dot the land with sanatoriums for which, he concludes, not more can 

 be said than for sensible treatment before their invention. 



Now, I have made and listened to a good many medical statements 

 on popular platforms respecting tuberculosis, but I have never become 

 conscious of the insobriety which has shocked Dr. Maudsley. On every 

 occasion, three factors in the etiology of phthisis — the seed, the soil 

 and the surroundings — have been fully recognized, and while emphasis 

 has been properly laid upon the seed as the primary and essential cause 

 of the disease, due weight has been given to the greater or less resist- 

 ance of the living tissues in which the seed is sown, and to the more or 

 less favorable nature of the environment during its germination and 

 growth. Dr. Maudsley is the apostle of heredity and of temperament 

 ■ — matters of great moment — but I do not know of any hereditary pre- 

 disposition or temperamental condition that will make a man proof 

 against a sufficient dose of arsenic or strychnia, and we have no evi- 

 dence that there is any that will make him immune to a sufficient dose 

 of the tubercle bacillus of sufficient virulence introduced into his sys- 

 tem. The resistance, to the implantation of the bacillus and to its 

 spread and propagation, varies greatly. In some habits of body it will 

 scarce take root; in others it springs up rapidly and flourishes lux- 

 uriantly, but congeniality of the soil is a very different thing from 

 hereditarv transmission, and there is no kind of inherited constitution 

 or temperament in which in the absence of the seed tuberculosis can 

 be developed. The bacillus has its heredity, as well as its animal or 

 human victim, and it is possible that the occasional failure of its at- 

 tacks may be due, not so much to the stoutness of the resistance offered, 

 as to the feebleness of the assistants, the descendants of an attenuated 

 stock. 



Dr. Maudsley says, ' no one thinking clearly ever thought that actual 

 tubercle may be inherited,' but in saying so he must, for a moment, 

 have lost his wonted lucidity of thought, for Professor Bang has dem- 

 onstrated that the tubercle bacillus has been found in the livers of the 

 new-born calves of tubercular cows. This mode of transmission of the 

 disease is, however, so rare that it may be ignored, and as it is certain 



