TUBERCULOSIS AND WAR

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 285, 21 August 1918, Page 7

TUBERCULOSIS AND WAR

Sir Robert Philip's inangur.il address on his appointment to tho' Edinburgh, choir of tuberculosis mis on well-known lines (says the "Hospital")- A member of tho "eontagionist school, ,he looks to segregation and treatment of existing cases as tho main means' of combating tiie disease, and considers thnt its extinction is hopeful, and, indeed, a mora matter of applying such means thoroughly . cno.igh. Unfortunately, as pointed out a littlo while ago in a leading article in tho "Lancet," this viow has beon shaken by the phenomenon of a great increase in tuberculosis occurring since the war began. Such'increaso has been much too sudden to be attributable to creator facilities of infection/and is agreed to be duo to impairment, on a largo scale, by many vrar conditions, of tho general health of the nations at war. Pesides this, there is the as yet practically unconsidered factor of intrinsic predisposition, lonjr suspected, but hitherto little defined. \ In short, it is the old tale, everywhere renewed, of etiology being a much more complex affair than at first apparent; of becoming tho more complex with each step in in its elucidation.