Tiibcrcitlosis. 291 



may from the cost of organization and armament, financially ruin 

 a land. The fatal termination and the local disadvantages of the 

 disease are, strictly speaking, not attributable to the inflammation 

 but to the causes of the inflammation. 



Tuberculosis. 



Tuberculosis is a contagious infectious disease having a very 

 wide distribution among man and the domestic animals, caused by 

 the tubercle bacillus discovered by Robert Koch in 1882, and char- 

 acterized anatomically by the formation of minute nodular inflam- 

 matory foci (tiibcrculuiu, a small node) which uniformly undergo 

 necrotic disintegration and by their progressive increase destroy the 

 tissue involved by them. 



This malady, the most common of all diseases, manifests itself 

 in man generally as a pulmonary affection of years' duration, causing 

 pulmonarv zvasting and consumption (phthisis, iromcpdlu, to waste, 

 consume) , but also producing painful destruction of bones and joints, 

 ulceration of the intestines, and tuberculous disease of the lymph 

 nodes, brain and other structures. Year after year tuberculosis car- 

 ries ofif over a million people in Europe, or nearly three thousand 

 every day, and must therefore be regarded as the most deadly of all 

 plagues, decimating the populace, and hurrying to death the effi- 

 cient youth and destroying the earning capacity of 'families by the 

 tedious course of the afifection and death of their members. 



The disease is no less a calamity to the cattle industry. Among 

 domestic animals cattle and swine are most frequently affected; 

 ten, twenty, yes eighty per cent, of the cattle brought to the larger 

 stock yards in some districts are diseased. The financial losses oc- 

 casioned by the affection of so many animals may be estimated by 

 hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, for these include 

 such varied elements as loss of weight and forced slaughter, impair- 

 ment of milk production and of edibility of the meat, and sterility or 

 transmission of the disease to offspring. Tuberculosis in cattle be- 

 comes doubly important when the danger to human health is con- 

 templated, because the milk of animals with tuberculosis of the udder 

 can transmit the disease to children and adults. 



The effort to overcome this infectious disease, which has been 

 continuallv on the increase during recent decades in man and in 

 animals, has therefore come to be one of the most important aims of 

 medicine, an object of municipal and national thoug-ht, and a matter 

 of interest both to the community and to the individual. 



