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 Cornet, ' would soon loosen the bonds of the family 

 and of society.' Happily, the facts of the case are very 

 different from those here set forth. 



' I would not,' says our author, s 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 expec- 

 torated matter becoming dry, and reduced afterwards to 

 a powder capable of being inhaled. 



* While a positive phthisiophobia appears to have 



