546 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION I. 
When is mankind going to awake to the fact that Science has placed this gift 
in its hands? Much more than half of the lame and spinally-deformed children 
in our midst are in that condition because of infection of joints or spine with 
the bacillus of tuberculosis. By open-air hospitals and open-air schools we seek 
and succeed in curing a percentage of them, but how much better it would be 
if we took the fundamental problem of tubercular infection in hand and 
prevented them from becoming lame and deformed? 
There is at present on foot in England a great scheme to enable the blind 
to read, and it deserves our support because it is our fault that these people are 
blind. The sad fate of the man born blind appeals to all kind hearts; but men 
are not born blind, they become blind within a week or two of birth because of 
an infectious disease contracted from the mother at birth. Science knows and 
has taught the world how this blindness can be quite prevented, and it is 
because of our faulty organisation for attending to maternities amongst the 
poor that these people are blind. By proper organisation practically all blind- 
ness arising at the time of birth can be prevented. Why is it not done? Thus 
our modern Science can make the blind to see and the lame to walk, but it is 
so manacled by ancient ways and customs that it is left powerless, and so there 
are these maimed and darkened lives of innocent people, and they are left 
partially burdening the community which has only its own folly to blame for 
the whole stupid position. 
Let us consider lastly a disease which collects the last toll from one-seventh 
of humanity, and debilitates and enfeebles the lives of many whom it does not 
entirely destroy. At all ages, in infancy, in the prime of life, and in life’s 
decline, it snatches away the best of our fellow-men. How are we organising 
our campaign against tuberculosis? Bacteriology has taught us that it is an 
infectious disease and has isolated the organism. It is an undoubted fact, proven 
to the hilt by many inquiries and observations, that infection passes from 
individual to individual. How is this knowledge being applied, and how are 
we attempting to stem the tide of infection? In the United Kingdom alone 
about 70,000 persons die annually of the disease, and all over the civilised world 
the total death-roll of human kind annually from tuberculosis ‘probably does 
not fall short of a million souls. This tide of infection is kept up, year in, year 
out, and every 70,000 dying annually in Britain must have infected 70,000 fresh 
victims before they themselves are carried away. Can it not be stopped, this 
foul tide of infection? What is being done to stop it? Sanatoria are being 
provided for the early cases, the bad and most infectious cases are largely being 
left alone to sow infection broadcast and then die. This is the chief means 
being used at present to stop the tide. The early non-infectious case is deemed 
the more important to look after, and the well-advanced, open, thoroughly 
infectious case is left to itself to infect others and then to die. This is the 
condition of our public health attitude in regard to tuberculosis. It is a travesty 
on the application of all biological laws, and in direct opposition to all laws of 
racial preservation. Industrial conditions have produced an artificial environ- 
ment and enhanced the chances of infection by the organism of this disease; 
it should be our plan to copy Nature’s method and safeguard the interests of 
the community, and to do this we must proceed on the plan of separating the 
source of infection—that is to say, the infectious individual from the sound 
individual. This is done with success in the case of small-pox and cholera, 
and this plan has eradicated hydrophobia; why should it not be carried out in 
the case of tuberculosis? Under present conditions men, women, and children 
are going on unwittingly infecting one another by the thousand with tuberculosis 
in school, workshop, and home, and we who know it take no public action and 
raise no clamant outcry against it. It is of more value to the community to 
isolate one pauper far advanced in tuberculosis than to send ten early cases to 
sanatoria. ‘This disease must be stopped at its source as well as dealt with on 
its course. No disease has ever been eradicated from a community by dis- 
covering cures for it, and none ever will; many diseases have disappeared 
because their sources have been cut off. 
Let us be scientific, let us search out the truth; having found it, let us act 
upon it, and let us conceal nothing that is true. 
