278 A HISTORY OF NATIONAL TUBERCULOSIS ASSOCIATION 



death of William McKinley. In November, 1904, he was elected 

 president for the term 1905 to 1909. After his retirement from 

 the presidency he became traveler, explorer, naturalist, big game 

 hunter, editor, and author. 



It has been said that Roosevelt himself as a child must have 

 been tuberculous, but this has not been confirmed, although the 

 possibility exists that there had been a tuberculous diathesis. 

 That he suffered from asthma and was very delicate as a child is 

 well known. If he had a tuberculous diathesis or a pronounced 

 predisposition to tuberculosis, he certainly knew how to master 

 it by choosing the life of a rancher and devoting a number of years 

 to building himself up to strong and vigorous manhood. The 

 occasional asthmatic attacks seem to have remained with him. 

 According to Dr. Alexander Lambert, for many years his private 

 physician, whenever Roosevelt was attacked with bronchitis he 

 would have "tremendous asthmatic spasms of his lungs." Asthma 

 seems to be antagonistic to the development of tuberculosis, and 

 so we may perhaps be grateful that only asthma was his chief 

 malady in youth. 



Roosevelt as a police commissioner became intensely interested 

 in public sanitation, clean streets, better housing, etc. His friend, 

 Jacob A. Riis, who was at the time engaged in the "battle with 

 the slums," had shown him the iniquity of allowing the existence 

 of overcrowded, unclean, and unsanitary tenements, factories, 

 and sweatshops in the city of New York, with their invariable 

 train of tuberculosis and other diseases. 



Throughout his official life, and even after his retirement from 

 public office, Roosevelt always had a deep interest in the welfare 

 of the laboring class, in their proper housing, and in factory and 

 workshop sanitation. In an address delivered in Chicago on 

 August 6, 1912, he referred to these vital problems of the nation's 

 welfare in the following words: 



" In the last twenty years an increasing percentage of our people have come 

 to depend on industry for their livelihood, so that to-day the wage workers in 

 industry rank in importance side by side with the tiller of the soil. As a people 

 we cannot afford to let any group of citizens, or individual citizens, live or labor 

 under conditions which are injurious to the common welfare. We must protect 

 the crushable elements at the base of our present industrial structure." 



