OUR PRESENT KNOWLEDGE OF 

 TUBERCULOSIS 



BY LINSLY R. WILLIAMS, M.D. 



Managing Director, The National Tuberculosis Association, New York City 



DURING the lyth and i8th centuries the words 

 "consumption" and "phthisis" were com- 

 monly used to designate various wasting dis- 

 eases now known to be of many varied types. In the 

 medical literature of this period there appears frequently 

 the word "tubercle," but what the authors meant by this 

 word was apparently nothing more than small nodules 

 the size of a small pea or smaller which were found from 

 time to time in bodies that were examined. Tubercle 

 was first described definitely by Baillie in England in 

 1793, who, relying on naked-eye observations, differ- 

 entiated tubercle from other tumors and commented 

 upon its constant appearance in autopsies of persons 

 dying of consumption. In 1810 Bayle in Paris at- 

 tempted to classify the different types of these tuber- 

 cles. A few years later (1819) Laennec, the inventor of 

 the stethoscope, showed that in autopsies made of 

 persons dying of consumption there were found in the 

 lungs small tubercles, agglomerations of many tuber- 

 cles. Also he found some tubercles which had under- 

 gone a partial degeneration; and found cavities in the 

 walls of which small tubercles appeared. By means of 



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