IS CONSUMPTION HEREDITARY ?

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XII, Issue XIII, 31 March 1894, Page 289

IS CONSUMPTION HEREDITARY ?

For more than a century the belief has been firmly established that the disease known in common parlance as consumption, and which the scientific world calls tuberculosis,

was hereditary, that is if a father or mother died of tuberculosis the children of the family were doomed and predestined to become victims of the same fell malady. No belief has been better established than this, and yet modern researches into the great and, as yet, imperfectly understood domain of bacteriology, seem to establish the proposition that consumption is not hereditary, but is communicable, and that cause and effect have been confused, as has happened so many times before in the world’s history. The latest and most reliable word of modern science on this point is, to put it unscientifically, that where consumption runs through a family it is not because the children inherit the disease from their parents, as they inherit the colour of their eyes or the shape of their noses, but that they have been subject to the same environment which produced tuberculosis in one or the other of the parents, or that the familiar and intimate contact with the parents, which naturally exists in every family, has inocculated the children with the germs and spores of the disease, which, finding a suitable locale and breeding ground, have developed into the disease itself. It is impossible to deny or refute the scientific testimony which has been presented of late in support of this view.

It has been demonstrated conclusively that consumption is a germ disease, not a blood taint, and that the germs excreted from the consumptive do not grow outside the living or animal organism, except under artificial conditions, though they may retain their vitality and virulence for long periods of time. Thus not only the air in rooms which have been occupied by consumptive patients becomes infected and capable of producing the disease when breathed by healthy persons in certain conditions of receptivity, but the dust which accumulates on walls, mouldings, and pictures in private houses and in hospital wards and ued rooms, is capable of producing the disease when used for the inocculation of susceptible animals. It has also been established beyond the possibility of controversy that tuberculosis may be transmitted by meat or milk from tubercular animals, and experiments made add confirmation to that which did not need to be confirmed. In other words, the greatest dread of the century, consumption, which counts its victims by thousands where plague and pestilence number theirs by tens, is the result of an external moving and malificent cause upon the human organism, and not a thing inevitable by hereditary or other-

wise, like old age and death. But what shall we do about it? How shall we prevent the spread of consumption, and thus, in time, stamp it out or compel it to die a natural death for want of fresh victims? The answer is ready made. The State, in its corporate capacity, should take charge of the whole matter and segregate consumptives from the community as carefully and thoroughly as it does those who have smallpox, or yellow fever, or leprosy. Every antiseptic precaution known to science should be employed to prevent the circulation of the disease germs, and whether a cure lie found for consumption or not, its dissemination should be rendered impossible. In the mean time it will be well for children of consumptive parents to dismiss from their minds the idea of a hereditary curse hanging over them, for, call it what we may, there can be no doubt that the mind does, in many respects, control the body, and that the person who believes that he or she has inherited consumption is precisely in the condition which the microbe of tuberculosis—which we might almost believe to be inspired by malevolent intelligence—is seeking. Many people frighten themselves into consumption when, if they would keep their wits about them, they would live to die of that universal and non escapable malady, old age.