i 9 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



symptoms of the decline have assumed the chronic form, before the 

 process of digestion becomes utterly deranged, before the impoverish- 

 ment of the blood results in dropsy and a livid discoloration of the 

 lips, while the patient has intervals of sound sleep and sound appetite, 

 and strength enough left to walk a couple of miles there is more than 

 an even chance that the disease can be permanently cured. One me- 

 mento only of its ravages will remain the acceleration of the breath- 

 ing-process whenever the convalescent engages in active exercise. 

 But even that inconvenience can be diminished by a system of training 

 that will gradually inure the lungs to the strain of the ordinary move- 

 ments and exertions of daily life : namely, by walking up-hill (or up- 

 stairs) with a load of daily increasing weight. After two months or 

 so it will take two scuttles full of coal to produce the panting and 

 gasping which used to result from a small pailful of water, and the 

 mere weight of the body will seem barely sufficient to indicate the 

 difference between a rough mountain-trail and a graded pike-road. 



A few years ago an emaciated Canadian miner came South for his 

 health, and located a small placer-claim on the plateau of the " Fort 

 Mountain," in Murray County, Georgia. The mountain is a mile high, 

 and the up-trip with a few dozen eggs from the next valley farm 

 obliged the miner to stop every few minutes to keep his chest from 

 bursting, but before the end of the year he was able to make the same 

 trip, without a stop, with a bushel-bag full of corn-meal. The waste 

 from the corrosions of the tubercle-virus can perhaps never be repaired, 

 but the healthy tissue of the remaining portion of the lung is suscep- 

 tible both of expansion and invigoration. The lungs expand and con- 

 tract with the chest. If three sisters marry on the same day the first 

 a ferryman, and learns to row a boat ; the second a tailor, and takes to 

 tight-lacing ; the third a grocer, and tends his shop an autopsy would 

 show that in twenty years after their separation the ferrywoman's 

 lungs have grown fifty per cent larger than the shopkeeper's, and fully 

 twice as large as the dressmaker's. 



But few consumptives ever outgrow the sensitiveness of their 

 lungs, and must beware of contagion, avoid crowded meetings and 

 lectures, and rather offend Mrs. Grundy than prolong their visits to a 

 catarrh - infected house. Thoroughly healed though reduced lungs 

 (reduced often to two thirds of their original size) will perform their 

 functions in a sufficient manner for a long series of years. With the 

 above-named precautions and a nutritive but strictly non-stimulating 

 diet, there is no reason why a convalescent from pulmonary scrofula 

 in its most unmistakable form should not enjoy an out-door festi- 

 val in honor of his eightieth birthday. It is well known that in the 

 deliquium of pulmonary consumption, in the stage of violent haem- 

 orrhages and dropsical swellings, the confidence of the patient often 

 gives way to gloomy forebodings the harbingers of the long night 

 that never fails to cast its shadows before. But this despondency 



