PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION I. 695 



5.— CONSUMPTION : A NATIONAL DISEASE AND ITS 

 EEMEDY. 



By C. REISSMANN, 31. A., 21. D. (Camh.), B.Sc, 21. B.C. P. (Lond.), Physician 

 in charge of Kalyra Sanatorium, and Assistant Physician to the Adelaide 

 Hospital, in charge of the Consumptive Department. 



[With Three Plates.] 



HISTORICAL. 



In a certain book of medicine tlie statement occurs that " the 

 greatest and most dangerous of all diseases, and the one that proves 

 fatal to the greatest number, is consumption." There is nothing very 

 astonishing in this statement except that the book in which it occurs 

 was written more than 2,000 years ago, by that astute observer 

 Hippocrates. What was true 2,000 years ago has been true ever since, 

 and year by year through all the centuries consumption has continued 

 to claim its victims. It has sought them chiefly among the young and 

 the beautiful, it has taken the promising and the best. To-day a 

 trustworthy writer assures us that consumption accounts for one- 

 seventh of all deaths, and that one-sixth of all mankind is tuberculous. 

 Everyone who realises what this means will wish to know something 

 about this disease, what it is, how it is contracted, how it is avoided, 

 how it is cured. 



So much has been spoken and written about consumption during 

 the last few years that I suppose everybody now knows that it it a 

 contagious disease, and that the immediate cause of the disease is a 

 tiny microscopic plant known as the tubercle bacillus, which was 

 discovered by Koch in 1882. 



Long before Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus, nay, centuries 

 before Pasteur created the science of bacteriology, the contagious 

 nature of consumption was suspected, known, and acted upon. 



Many scientific truths and laws of nature which were discovered 

 during the last century — the age of scientific renaissance — may be found 

 dimly outlined in the ancient writings of men like Heraclitus and 

 Lucretius, and so it is with the contagious nature of consumption. 



Isocrates, more than 2,000 years ago, knew and taught that con- 

 sumption is a contagious disease, and Galen, in the second century 

 after Christ, wrote "periculosu7n freterea est consuescere cum his qui 

 tabe tenentur " (it is moreover a dangerous thing to live with those who 

 are consumptive). * 



Avicenna, 100 years after Christ, and Montano,' 1,400 years later, 

 proclaimed the contagious nature of consumption. Monanto, indeed, 

 believed that it was possible to contract consumption by walking bare- 

 footed over the expectoration of a tuberculous patient. 



Once or more during every few centuries some gxeat physician 

 appears to have discovered that consumption is a contagious disease, 

 but the warning has not often been heeded. 



* For this and other historical facts mentioned lam indebted to Knopf's 

 Alvaregna Prize Essay. 



