NO. I AIR AND TUBERCULOSIS — HINSDALE I29 



tions whether or not we should wish to stake our chances of recovery 

 in any of them. 



Of course we do not claim that there is any specific climate for 

 tuberculosis and the long search for such climate, a search lasting 

 for nearly two thousand years, is apparently at an end. 



Now what is there left to us, and what do we understand by a 

 climatic change? 



We all know that the New England climate is changeable, that is, 

 the meteorological conditions are constantly varying just as they 

 also vary in the Mississippi Valley and along the Atlantic seaboard. 

 But the New England climate is p^eculiarly unstable and, as Charles 

 Dudley Warner has said, " New England is the battle-ground of 

 the weather." 



We have a change of climate when we leave the hot city in summer 

 and go a few miles to the shore. We have floating hospitals so that this 

 climatic change may stimulate a sick child to recovery. A so-called 

 " home-climate " may work a cure or aid in a cure because we leave 

 the climate of our homes, often too dry with furnace heat, too poorly 

 ventilated, too damp from lack of sun, and remove to more hygienic 

 dwellings in the same locality where sun and air and cleanliness 

 abound. 



But, to take up the principal question at issue, the first thing usu- 

 ally asked is whether one should go to the Adirondacks, Colorado, 

 New Mexico, Arizona, California, or elsewhere, in order to get 

 what is so frequently claimed to be the greatest climatic advantages. 

 No one who has visited these localities can fail to be impressed with 

 the living examples of recovery from tuberculosis. Denver, Colo- 

 rado Springs, and innumerable towns in southern California abound 

 in doctors who have practically recovered from this disease and are 

 earning a living that is the envy of their eastern confreres. 



Would they have recovered in their eastern homes ? Almost to a 

 man they answer " No." I have never heard of an exception. But 

 the case is hard to prove from such ex parte evidence. However, 

 it is interesting to note Dr. H. B. Dunham's conclusion. He stated 

 in 1904, after visiting discharged Massachusetts State Sanatorium 

 patients in the west, and after comparing Massachusetts Sanatorium 

 statistics with those of the U. S. Army Sanatorium at Fort Bayard, 

 New Mexico, that "the results corroborate our beliefs in the effi- 

 cacy of residence in dry climates, but with a smaller margin in its 

 favor than was anticipated." The proportion of people adapted for 

 treatment in these extremes of climate must be more equal than 



