330 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



Just how much tuberculosis we have in the rural districts in 

 proportion to the great cities is pretty hard to say: but every 

 one who has investigated it is -positive in the opinion that there 

 is just as much in the country districts : indeed, some report more 

 in the country than in the adjoining cities. We find it in the 

 farmhouse and the mountain home : habits of carelessness possibly 

 keep up the infection. We do not have "lung blocks," like the 

 large cities, but we do have "lung houses," where case after case 

 of tuberculosis has lived and perhaps developed. 



The prevalence of tuberculosis in the country is so evidently 

 marked that there is a growing interest in the subject in many 

 places. The Wisconsin Antituberculosis League, a year or so 

 ago, made a very careful and exact sanitary survey of a certain 

 rural district in that State, relative to the amount of this dis- 

 ease, and found that in some parts of this district the death-rate 

 from tuberculosis exceeded that of Milwaukee, Wisconsin 's largest 

 city. 



Minnesota also discovered that it had much tuberculosis in its 

 rural districts. "As serious," says Dr. Daugherty, who investi- 

 gated the subject, ' ' as that in the congested areas of the cities. ' ' 

 Following a rural survey of several townships, under the auspices 

 of the State Antituberculosis Association, there were found hous- 

 ing conditions much as I have described in the preceding pages 

 as existing in Pennsylvania. "The average number of people 

 sleeping in one room," says the report, "was four." In one 

 house there were eight, in another nine, and it was not at all 

 uncommon to find five or six. This was not due to the fact that 

 there was not enough room, for in many of the houses the whole 

 family would sleep in one room, use one for the kitchen, and 

 leave two, three, and in some cases four, rooms vacant. 



Coincident with this bad housing there was found one township 

 where there were twenty-two deaths from tuberculosis in a popu- 

 lation of 500 in ten years : a death rate of 44 per 10,000. These 

 investigators in Minnesota also found that "contributing causes, 

 as overwork and poor food, which play such an important part 

 among the inhabitants of the crowded tenement districts, do not 

 usually count for much in the country. Bad housing and unre- 

 stricted exposure to contagion seem to be the great factors. ' ' Of 

 course, in certain well-to-do farming districts, such as were under 



