404 Veterinary Medicine. 



mon people and physicians both associated tuberculosis with a 

 malady so notoriously contagious as syphilis, speaks strongly for 

 the forcible evidence of contagion manifested at that time. Mor- 

 gagni, who must have begun practice about 1700 A. D., testifies 

 to the strong conviction of the contagious element in tuberculosis. 

 Indeed it became a common practice to isolate the consumptive 

 person from the public, and after his death to burn his clothes 

 and sometimes even the house, or at least to subject them to a 

 careful disinfection. It is recorded that in 1750, in Nancy, the 

 magistrates ordered the burning, in the public square, of the per- 

 sonal property of a woman who had died of phthisis, from sleeping 

 in the bed of another consumptive person. 



" At Naples, a royal edict of September 20, 1782, prescribed 

 the sequestration of the phthisical, the disinfection of the rooms, 

 chattels, movables, books, etc., with vinegar, eau-de-vie, lemon 

 juice, sea-water, fumigations, etc., under a penalty of three years 

 at the galleys, or in the case of nobles, of three years imprison- 

 ment and a fine of 300 ducats. A physician who failed to report 

 a case of consumption was fined 300 ducats for the first offense, 

 and banishment for ten years in case of a second. Any one as- 

 sisting in such evasion of the law was sent to prison for six 

 months. 



" Chateaubriand found that, in 1803, he could not sell his car- 

 riages in Rome, because Mme. Beaumont, who had died of con- 

 sumption, had ridden in them three or four times. George Sand, 

 who was with the phthisical Chopin in Minorca in 1839, was re- 

 fused a lease of the house for the second month, and the price of 

 repainting and purifying was demanded. Later, in Barcelona, 

 they were assessed for the bed on which Chopin had slept, as the 

 police regulations prescribed it should be burned. 



" This was not a mere survival of vulgar prejudice. Jacobi 

 tells us of a dog which died of consumption from eating the sputa 

 of his phthisical master. Laennec, the discoverer of auscultation, 

 and the great authority on pulmonary consumption, records that 

 he himself contracted a tuberculous nodule, through a wound 

 with a saw, while making a necropsy in a case of phthisis. 

 Laennec died of tuberculosis later, although he seemed to have 

 checked this lesion by caustics. Andral joins Laennec in enjoin- 

 ing the greatest caution and cleanliness in taking care of, or asso- 

 ciating with persons having advanced tuberculosis. 



