THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 3 



we must inquire after the cause of the most fatal disease. The alcohol- 

 habit slays its thousands every year ; but statistics prove that human 

 life has a more terrible foe. The proportion of deaths from all diseases 

 that can be ascribed to the effects of intemperance relates as three and a 

 half to ten in Northern Europe, and as four to ten in the United States 

 and Canada to the mortality-rate of pulmonary consumption. With- 

 out counting acute pneumonia and other fatal lung-diseases, tubercular 

 phthisis alone claims yearly one life out of 410 to 415 ; or an aggregate 

 which, for the United States, has been estimated at 94,000 ; in Great 

 Britain and Ireland, 110,000 (or one of every 300 inhabitants) ; in 

 France, 80,000 ; in European Russia, 105,000 ; in Northern Germany 

 (including the Polish provinces of Prussia), 82,000. And the quantum 

 of the mischief is still aggravated by its quality. Consumption ful- 

 fills no scavenger's mission : the most voracious is, withal, the most 

 fastidious disease, and selects its victims from the most industrious 

 classes of the noblest nations ; hard-working mechanics, devoted sup- 

 porters of large families, bread-winning laborers and prize-winning 

 students are its favorite victims. For the last fifty years its ravages 

 have steadily increased ; but the excess of the evil has finally revealed 

 the means of deliverance, and the worst scourge of the human race 

 has one redeeming feature : that its cause, and consequently its proper 

 cure, have at last been determined with absolute certainty. Not more 

 than fifty years ago the consumption-problem was still the crux medi- 

 corum ; the disease seemed almost unaccountable and wholly incurable. 

 Practical physicians had ascertained the value of certain secondary rem- 

 edies, the prophylactic influence of fat and phosphates (cod-liver oil, 

 etc.), and of chest-expanding gymnastics ; but they had failed to recog- 

 nize the great specific. Misled by the most prevalent of all popular 

 delusions the Cold- Air Fallacy * they ascribed consumption to the 

 influence of a low temperature, and tried to cure it by sending their 

 wealthier patients to a warmer climate and the poorer to an air-tight 

 sick-room. There were hospitals for consumptives where invalids were 

 nursed with a care that would have insured recovery from almost every 

 other disease, but here all calculations were defeated by the result of 

 one wrong factor ; the chief efficacy of the treatment was supposed to 

 depend upon the exclusion of every draught of fresh air. 



But statistics have at last exploded that delusion. It was ascer- 

 tained that consumption is essentially a house-disease. North or south, 



* " Dry and intensely cold air preserves decaying organic tissues by arresting decom- 

 position, and it would be difficult to explain how the most effective remedy came to be 

 suspected of being the cause of tuberculosis, unless we remember that, where fuel is ac- 

 cessible, the disciples of civilization rarely fail to take refuge from excessive cold in its 

 opposite extreme an overheated, artificial atmosphere, and thus come to connect severe 

 winters with the idea of pectoral complaints. . . . They avoid cold instead of impurity, 

 just as tipplers, on a warm day, imagine that they would ' catch their death ' by a draught 

 from a cool fountain, but never hesitate to swallow the monstrous mixtures of the liquor- 

 venders " (" Physical Education," p. 80 ; compare pp. 85, 98, and 248). 



