THE TREATMENT OF CONSUMPTION.

Auckland Star, Volume XXX, Issue 76, 1 April 1899, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE TREATMENT OF CONSUMPTION.

Under the auspices of the Edinburgh Health Society, a lecture (by special request) was delivered in the Free Assembly Hall by DrC Caverfcill on 'The Crusade Against Consumption.' .;-• I ■ ' rf|jk >. ;. ■ Dr. Caverhill said that in consumption they had a disease which had called forth no organised effort on its behalf, and which seemed to have baffled every attempt to prevent

or cure it. Its sufferers were usually denied admission to the general hospitals; and if some urgent symptoms compelled their admission, they improved perhaps with "better air, feeding, and treatment, but they returned home only to begin anew their hopeless struggle against the disease. In the whole history of medicine for 2000 years few cures of consumption were recorded. Its supposed hereditary iiatxue came to be a universal article of belief —a belief which had been the cause of untold misery to the human race.- All that was changed, and. they could now predict such a diminution of disease, suffering, and death from, consumption as would have few parallels in the history of any other disease. Statistics revealed the almost incredible fact that amongst the industrial poor, between, the ag-as, of fifteen and sixty, one in every four male workers died of consumption. Females also yielded a precisely similar mortality. It was in the prevention of consumption that they must place the greatest hope of suppressing it. They had a scientific basis for that opinion, and they had ample evidence of the almoet total extinction of diseases iuiinitely more infectious than donsumption. Consumption chiefly prevailed in densely crowded populations, especially where individuals weie closely packed together in low lvh>g, badly drained localities, where 1h? ictms they lived in were charged with all kinds of organic impurity, e«].ec:aliy with emanations from the lungs, or bodies, or with ground air vapours from soil reeking with putrefying organic material. If this Health Committee took the mattes xtp, they no doubt would find, as had been done in New York, Manchester, and Glasgow, that there were parts of our towns and individual houses from which consumption was never absent, and that there was some material in insanitary dwellings which clung to their interiors, and that that material, on close examination, would be found to be tuberculous dust, or the dried discharges from a sufferer from consumption, or some other form of tvurculosis. Schools, factories, prisons, hospitals, asylums, etc., must^ all come under more direct inspection. By-laws must be framed for ,ths removal and destruction of all expectoration from public places and buildings. Public bodies must be enjoined to "do their part in the same direction, especially in public conveyances, white private individuals would, no doubt, in i).eir own interest, and that of their families, co-operate with the authorities In destroying the chief source of danger —the infective sputum. Above all, means' must be takeu to educate the public as to its true nature—that it was in certain circumstances an infectious or communicable disease, and that these conditions were well known and could be guarded against. (Applause.) _**