166 MICKOBES AND HEALTH. 



made, even by medical officers of health.' On page 31, 

 in continuation of the same subject, he says: 'I have 

 never yet found any satisfactory proof of infection, 

 direct or indirect, in any well ventilated house in this 

 country, and this in spite of close contact, as in the 

 attendance of a wife upon her husband or in the nurs- 

 ing and sleeping together of near relatives and friends/ 

 The late Dr. James E. Learning uses the following 

 example to illustrate the false notion of tubercular con- 

 tagion : 'A mother, after watching her children, three 

 or four in number, through scarlatina of a severe type, 

 began to cough, lose weight and finally died of phthisis. 

 She was well when the children were taken ill; she was 

 a loving, anxious mother, and as they were attacked 

 successively the time of her anxiety was prolonged. 

 The children all recovered, but the mother was sacri- 

 ficed. She was not aware of having taken cold. The 

 cough was so insidious that no one could tell when it 

 commenced. Had there been the same prolonged 

 anxiety over a case of phthisis, followed by inconsolable 

 despair at the loss of the loved one, it would have 

 seemed to prove the communicability of consumption/ 

 Dr. Alexander James makes the statement that 'many 

 examples of contagion, real or apparent, have, of 

 course, been brought forward, but the records of con- 

 sumption hospitals and the fact that one often sees in 

 a general hospital a phthisical case with numerous 

 bacilli in his sputum, having alongside of him patients 

 with fibroid, bronchiectatic or syphilitic disease, and 

 yet in whose sputum or lungs no trace of bacilli can be 

 discovered, seem incompatible with a belief in con- 



