Tuberculosis. 405 



" Cullen, who started with a strong prejudice against the doc- 

 trine of contagion, leaves us the following instance of its occur- 

 rence : ' A young man predisposed to phthisis married a Dutch 

 girl of a sanguine temperament and good constitution. Some 

 days after the marriage the woman lost her fresh color and was 

 attacked by a bad cough ; a month later she commenced spitting 

 blood. The physician advised her not to sleep in the same bed 

 with her husband, but she refused to follow his advice, and six 

 months later she died of phthisis. The servant who took care of 

 her and the domestic, who avoided, as far as possible, staying in 

 the sick chamber, both died of consumption.' 



" Wickmann, court physician in Hanover, in 1780, pronounces 

 emphatically for contagion. In Zurich, at that time, one death 

 in every six was from phthisis. The contagion of phthisis was 

 slow in its operation, and was, therefore, less evident than that 

 of plague, smallpox, scarlatina and other affections attended by a 

 skin eruption, but it was no less real and deadly. It was also 

 less frequently indirect, or carried from victim to victim by inter- 

 mediate agents. He cited instances of the transmission of con- 

 sumption from husband to wife and vice versa, and claimed that 

 the marriage of a phthisical person should be legally prevented. 

 As a means of preventing the disease, he proposed a strict sur- 

 veillance of establishments for the sale of old clothes, and the 

 avoidance of leaving infants with consumptives. 



" Valsalvi and Sarcoid refused to make necropsies of persons 

 who had died of phthisis. 



" Dr. Ruhling, of Gottingen, writing in 1774, of the disease in 

 animals, says : ' The malady is transmitted to sound animals by 

 direct contact of animals standing side by side in the stall, and 

 licking each other, and breathing the expired air direct from the 

 diseased lungs ; the frequenting of the same pastures will also 

 serve to propagate it.' In Krunitz's encyclopedia, published in 

 Berlin, in 1787, is the following: 'The heifers show an ardent 

 desire for the male, and remarkably enough, do not become preg- 

 nant, but part with the fruit of conception. When opened these 

 animals show the first stomach, kidneys and surface of the lungs, 

 covered with pustules like dried mulberries or in suppuration. 

 The affection is contagious, and communicates itself from one an- 

 imal to another by contact.' 



