404: ON THE ORIGIN, PROPAGATION, 



tubercle bacilli are carried outwards by the breath, 

 then nothing remains for us but to wait till an infected 

 puff of expired air conveys to us our doom. A kind of 

 fatalism, sometimes dominant in relation to this ques- 

 tion, would thus have its justification. There is no 

 inhabited place without its proportion of phthisical 

 subjects, who, if the foregoing supposition were correct, 

 would be condemned to infect their neighbours. Ter- 

 rible in this case would be the doom of the sufferer, 

 whom we should be forced to avoid, as, in earlier ages, 

 the plague-stricken were avoided. Terrible, moreover, 

 to the invalid would be the consciousness that with every 

 discharge from his lungs he was spreading death among 

 those around him. " Such a state of things," says Cor- 

 net, " would soon loosen the bonds of the family and of 

 society." Happily, the facts of the case are very differ- 

 ent from those here set forth. 



" I would not," says our author, " go into this sub- 

 ject so fully, I would not here repeat what is already 

 known, were I not convinced that, in regard to this 

 special point, the most erroneous notions are prevalent, 

 not only amongst the general public, but even among 

 highly-cultivated medical men. Misled by such no- 

 tions, precautions are adopted which are simply calcu- 

 lated to defeat the end in view. Thus it is that while 

 one physician anxiously guards against the expired 

 breath of the phthisical patient, another is careful to 

 have his spittoon so covered up that no bacilli can escape 

 into the air by evaporation. Neither of them makes 

 any inquiry about the really crucial point whether the 

 patient has deposited all his sputum in the spittoon, 

 thus avoiding the possibility of the expectorated matter 

 becoming dry, and reduced afterwards to a powder ca- 

 pable of being inhaled. 



"While a positive phthisiophobia appears to have 



