428 WARNING "NOTE." 



or to debar us from the light and leading of such investi- 

 gations as that which is here so imperfectly described. 

 Your obedient servant, 



JOHN TYNDALL. 

 HIND HEAD, April 20, 1882. 



NOTE. 



Twenty years ago I received letters describing to me the grief 

 and ruin introduced into families through the notion, then preva- 

 lent, that typhoid fever is non-contagious. When Dr. William 

 Budd published his researches on this subject, showing by facts 

 and reasonings as cogent as it was in the power of science to sup- 

 ply, the infectiousness of the fever, certain writers discerned in 

 that important work a proof of the decadence of Budd's intellect, 

 and gave the public the benefit of their conclusions. 



In regard to the contagiousness of phthisis, we have now, it 

 seems, to face the same danger. It may not, therefore, be out of 

 place to cite an illustration of the recklessness simulated by the 

 assertion that " consumption is not an infectious disease." While 

 occupied with experiments on the inhalation of tuberculous air by 

 dogs, Tappeiner was assisted by a robust man of forty, who was 

 specially warned never to tarry in the locality where the dogs were 

 confined. He, however, seemed bent on proving the doctrine of 

 tubercle-contagion to be a delusion, and recklessly exposed himself 

 to the infective air. This strong man, who was free from any 

 suspicion of hereditary taint, was smitten by tuberculosis of ex- 

 actly the same kind as that exhibited by the dogs, and in fourteen 

 weeks he was a corpse. Examination after death proved the 

 identity of the disease which killed him with that which affected 

 the dogs; the only difference being that he, having lived longer, 

 exhibited the malady in a more advanced stage. (October, 1891.) 



J. T. 



