SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1904. HUMANITY'S CHIEF SCOURGE. A Pill Without Gilt.

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 224, 15 October 1904, Page 6

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1904. HUMANITY'S CHIEF SCOURGE. A Pill Without Gilt.

THE plague killed a few persons vi the colonies a while ago with startling suddenness. Then uprose the authorities, and smote rat and flea hip and thigh paid for the rodents' scalps, and spent thousands of pounds on purification. A man drops dead of heart disease. He suffers, perhaps, one pang, and is gone. "How truly awful I" you exclaim. A small, but increasing, proportion of people die from cancer. The medical and scientific world us engrossed m finding out how to combat the dread disease. * * * The medical world knows how to combat consumption, which is responsible for one-fifth of the deaths m all civilised countries. The patients linger. They don't, as a rvle, die with dramatic suddenness. They are optimistic themselves to the end. The deaths of a thousand consumptives cause less of a nutter ttan the death of a single plague patient. As Dr. Mason, chief health officer, points out, this is because we are used to it. We accept tin continuance of the scourge as inevitable. * * * The man who 1 sold diseased provisions would be harshly dealt with. The consumptive who sowed disease germs on the public streets wouldn't br- harshly dealt with. He would bo pitied. He might be indirectly the cause of the death of hundreds of people. The direct cause is carelessness, lack of knowledge, apathy. Says a great physician : "Consumption is the greatest scourge that ever visited mankind, and is responsible for more suffering and deaths than any other disease " And he and all modern physicians are agreed that a check can be put upon its ra-\ ages by the observance of reasonally simple rules. * * *■ There is no limit to the danger tl" at an affected person may cause by spitting on the street The cure is simple. Don't spit. Don't summons spitters, sound or ill. Arrest them. It is courting the disease to li\e with an affected person. Therefore, isolate him while indoors. It is helping him to his grave to keep him in stuffy quarters, in a dark or srnless place The sun is the germ's most deadly enemy.

It is morally criminal to allow new tenants to' occupy a house which has been inhabited by a consumptive As was recently proved, the v all-paper of such a house was deeply impregnated with the bacilli of the scourge. Dr. Mason believes it is best not to appear to teach. It is best to "gild the philosophic pill " One may cover the pill with 'too much "jam." We don't know whether the average consumptive is a very selfish person, but surely, if he knew that by carelessness he might sow his disease, and spread sorrow and disaster, he might be told without any gilding or jam at all that it was his duty to' prevent death m oruers if possible. * * *■ Who has not seen a man racked with consumption with a mouthful of bank-notes on a racecourse, and noted a tuberculous patient drinking from a hotel glass which will be dipped m cold water, smeared over with a towel, and passed on within the minute? Perhaps, he doesn't know he is doing any harm He may not do any. But, there is the chance. We quarantine people from infected ports. We allow consumptives to come ashore, without question. It is humane to them, but not always to everybody else. The children m the schools, the man in the street, the mother in the nursery, the milkman in the dairy, t^e landlord with the six houses built on the space for three, want the "pill" administered without gilt or jam. They should all be taught tt recognise the danger, and, if not fearful of it for themselves, should bo unselfish enough to keep the great enemy from attacking others