29S POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE GEEAT WHITE PLAGUE. 



By Dr. JOHN B. HUBER, 



NEW YORK CITY. 



T T is with a very real sense of melancholy that one contemplates the 

 ■■*- long death-roll of those of the world's great men and women who 

 have succumbed untimely to the tubercle bacillus, which is and has 

 been through countless generations by far the most potent of all death- 

 dealing agencies. Had it not been for this detestable parasite, Bastien 

 Le Page might have given us another Joan-of-Arc to feast our eyes 

 upon; Eachel might for many years have continued to permeate the 

 spirits of her audiences with the divine fire that was in her. Our navy 

 did well enough in the 1812 war, as all the world knows; but what a 

 rip-roaring time there would have been if John Paul Jones had lived 

 to take a hand in it. We might be reading some more of Stephen 

 Crane's splendid war stories; we might have had some more of Eobert 

 Louis Stevenson's delicious lace- work; Schiller might have given us 

 another 'Song of the Bells'; we might have taken another 'Sentimental 

 Journey ' with Laurence Sterne ; Henry Cuyler Bunner might have con- 

 tinued to delight us, and to touch our hearts; John Keats might have 

 given us another Endymion. Had the tubercle bacillus permitted, 

 jSTevin might have vouchsafed us another 'Eosary'; von Weber another 

 'Euryanthe Overture'; Chopin might have dreamed another 'First 

 Polonaise'; and the tender flute notes of Sidney Lanier might even 

 now be heard. Maria Constantinova Bashkirtseff, Zavier Bichat, John 

 Godman, Eene Theophile Hyacinth Laennac, Henry Purcell, John 

 Sterling, Henry Timrod, Artemas Ward, Henry Kirk White, Henry 

 David Thoreau, Baruch Spinoza — such names as these are but a moiety 

 among those of the world's nobility, whose precious lives were cut off 

 in their prime by the ' Great White Plague.' 



And our sense of resentment is by no means mitigated when we 

 reflect that this bacillus is so minute that it was reserved for Koch, 

 in our own time, with the aid of an exquisitely high-powered micro- 

 scope, to discover it, and to reveal its life history and its habits and 

 properties. It were indeed worthy the pen of a Heine to set forth how, 

 although our mastodons are extinct, although we easily destroy all 

 other visible brute creation, although we hold ourselves to be world 

 masters and universe compellers, the race has nevertheless until our 

 generation been impotent in the presence of an organism, measuring in 

 length one ten-thousandth of an inch and in breadth one fifty-thou- 



