82 MORE POT-POURRI 



The strides that have been made towards the accom- 

 plishment of these three wishes of mine during the last 

 year is simply astonishing. The newly formed National 

 Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, whose 

 office is in Hanover Square, has for its great object to 

 instruct people on the infectiousness of tuberculosis and 

 the best methods of arresting it. Everyone who read 

 the account of the first meeting of this society at Marl- 

 borough House must have been struck with the fact that 

 when the Queen's herd of cows were tested, thirty-six of 

 them were condemned to be slaughtered. 



A century ago, when first invalids were sent to the 

 Riviera and Madeira, all the doctors distinctly taught 

 that the disease was hereditary, and not infectious. The 

 natives of these health resorts soon discovered, to their 

 cost, that the disease was infectious ; for it spread 

 amongst the population in the same way as it now has 

 at Davos, where tuberculosis was formerly unknown. 

 The superstition, as the doctors of the 'forties thought 

 it, of the peasants round Nice — who held that consump- 

 tion was really catching — made such an impression on 

 my mother, whose whole soul was bent on saving her 

 children from the disease of which their father died, 

 that she brought us up on the lines of that belief, and 

 kept us from every one whom she in any way suspected 

 of being consumptive, even when their complaint may 

 have been but a constitutional cough. 



Perhaps this training is what has made me somewhat 

 sceptical about the medical science of any day being 

 absolutely conclusive. I sometimes think that the im- 

 plicit faith that people are apt to place in doctors may 

 be injurious to the community, and that experience and 

 quackery sometimes turn out to be scientifically truer 

 than the medical theory of the hour. Shocking as many 

 will think the suggestion, I believe this may eventually 



