Sir John Simon. 345 



diminution in phthisis.* The two facts above referred to, namely, the 

 injurious influence of dampness of soil and the liability of persons 

 following indoor occupations, afforded ground for regarding phthisis as 

 a preventable disease, and consequently for attaching the utmost 

 importance to the acquirement of information as to its nature and 

 aetiology. 



At the very time that these important investigations were in 

 progress, the discovery was made in France that tuberculous disease 

 could be communicated by inoculation to animals. Simon promptly 

 recognized " the immense pathological consequences which it involved," 

 arid initiated (in 1867) an experimental inquiry as to the facts. By 

 elaborate and multiplied anatomical investigations it was ascertained 

 that the disease so produced was identical in its essential characters 

 with tubercular disease in man ; and from this fact, in connection with 

 what was previously known as regards " the mode in which tubercle 

 in man tends to spread infectively from its original site to secondary 

 and tertiary sites in the affected body," it was concluded that tubercle 

 in man " must be a specific zymotic disease."! But the scope of this 

 conclusion was limited by the observation that in certain animals a 

 series of pathological changes, scarcely distinguishable in their develop- 

 ment from tuberculosis, occasionally presented themselves as the 

 results of localized traumatic infection. The result of this observation 

 was to throw doubt on the setiological specificity of the contagium of 

 tubercle a doubt which was not completely removed until Koch, a 

 few years later, discovered the tubercle bacillus. 



As a writer on preventive medicine, Simon is distinguished from 

 most others by the higher level of the standpoint from which he 

 regarded the responsibilities of the State and of the individual. The 

 two spheres philanthropy and public duty were, in his conception of 

 them, one. He imposed on himself and on those who worked with him 

 the strictest punctuality in the discharge of public duty, but was not 

 the less dominated and guided by motives higher than those of mere 

 official obligation. Of these motives the dominant one was the desire 

 to help the poor, to mitigate the miseries which penury brings with it, 

 and to save life. After these came the desire to work for the same 

 ends by adding to the sum of human knowledge. His views as to the 

 philanthropic aim which should actuate all sanitary efforts can be best 

 learned from the introductory chapters of the work on "English 

 Sanitary Institutions."! Readers who knew Simon will understand 

 the feeling with which, in one of these chapters, entitled " Mediaeval 

 philanthropy," he writes of the wonderful outburst of Christian 



* Loc. cit., pp. 335-338. f Loc. cit., p. 34-2. 



J "English Sanitary Institutions," London, 1897 (2nd edition). 



