AND PKEVENTION OF PHTHISIS. 415 



intercommunication with the consumptive patients whc> 

 spend their winter at that health-resort, it would seein 

 as if some people shut their eyes wilfully against the 

 truth.' 



Again and again our author insists on the necessity 

 of the most searching oversight on the part of physi- 

 cians who have consumptive patients in charge. * I 

 cannot,' he says, ' accept as valid the assertion that in 

 well-ordered hospitals provision is invariably made for 

 expectoration into proper vessels, the conversion of the 

 sputum into infectious dust being thereby rendered im- 

 possible. Take a case in point. One of the physicians 

 to whose kindness I owe the possibility of carrying on 

 my investigation, assured me in the most positive 

 manner that the patients in his hospital invariably used 

 spittoons. A few minutes after this assurance had been 

 given, and under the eyes of the director himself, I drew 

 from the bed of a patient a pocket-handkerchief filled 

 with half-dried phlegm. I rubbed from the wall of the 

 room, at a distance of half a meter from the bed of this 

 patient, a quantity of dust, with which, as I predicted, 

 tuberculosis was produced. If, therefore, physicians, 

 attendants, and patients do not work in unison, if the 

 patient and his attendants be not accurately instructed 

 and strictly controlled, the presence of the spittoon will 

 not diminish the danger.' 



In the dwellings of private patients the perils here 

 glanced at were most impressively brought home to 

 the inquirer. In fifteen out of twenty-one sick-rooms, 

 that is to say, in more than two-thirds of them, Cornet 

 found in the dust of the walls and bed-furniture virulent 

 tubercle bacilli. He refers to his published tables to 

 prove that in no ward or room where the organism was 

 found did the patients confine themselves to expectora- 

 tion into spittoons, but were in the habit of spitting 



