The Daily News WEDNESDAY, MAY 30. CIVILISATION'S CURSE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVII, Issue 8122, 30 May 1906, Page 2

The Daily News WEDNESDAY, MAY 30. CIVILISATION'S CURSE.

War, pestilence, and famine occur at longer or shorter intervals. They sweep thousands into the grave with alarming suddenness, The public is stirred to great sorrow at a San Francisco disaster. The loss of life in a volcanic eruption such as occurred at Naples lately touches any community deeply. An epidemic of plague in the colonies, though it may only carry off a score or so of people, horrifies the public. Extraordinary precautions are taken to isolate patients. The public demands such measures for its own safety. * * # *

A greater scourge than any of those named is consumption —civilisation's most dreadful disease, and a disease that until recently was believed to be incurable. As consumption is a disease entirely due to civilisation, it has up to now defied any " civilised " attempts to cure it. The old idea of treatment for most diseases was to look upon God's good air and sunshine as a special brand of undiluted poison. The room of the old-time, consumptive was a eharnel house filled with indescribable fcetor. A draught of air would be looked upon almost as fatal; brightness, cheerfulness, a crime. It takes folks a long time to find out that Nature is not the oldfashioned frump the* old-fashioned doctors would have us credit her with being. We remember a consumptive young mail whose people were intelligent enough to give Nature a show by making him camp in a tei.t on the sun-struck hill; by making him wander about with few clothe* between him and the medicine th< Creator supplies. The neighbours complained to the authorities that the young man's friends were deliberately murdering him. The authorities laughed. That young man lias whole lungs to-day.

It is ignorance that really' humane and up-to-date physicians have to fight, and many people up to this pre sent time are woefully iguorant, although their name for it is " kindheartedness." Another instance of this "kind-heartedness." A man was thrown violently from his machine iii a bicycle race. He lay lifeless The first instinct of his kindhearted friends was to lay him on a blanket. They had been brought iip in the old fashioned stuffy manner, and they believed the correct thing to do was to wrap him up. A professional nurse ia the crowd rolled the man on to the grass at once, and was immediately the object of howls of execration for her " cruelty,"* It is cruel in the eyes of many modern people to understand any of Nature's curative methods. You who are scared to death almost at the thought of catching a cold, because some of the air of heaven blows on you, can hardly credit the well-known fact that a dying consumptive is often brought back from the grave by the means that a tobust person is afraid of. * * * * The Maoris get consumption,and are wiped out with great suddenness. The old-time Maori did not get consumption, It is usually supposed that the careless habits of the Maoris - getting wet and the like—are responsible. In the old times the Maori got wet, but he didn't wear a pile of wet European clothes. Tho Maori is being clothed to death. The presence of a long-dead shark near the kaianga is not so great a menace to health as the tailor-made clothes and the overcoat a native will wear on a hot day, and which he may discard as soon as the wind blows from the South. Mature has been so kind to the civilised man that he is able to live a stuffy existence with comparative impunity, but Nature expects her toll in many diseases, of which the worst is consumption. * * # *

Tins Health Department of the colony is fighting consumption. Everywhere camps for consumptives are springing up, and the old study business is boing swept away by intelligent practitioners. At the same time, in our big cities, there are hundreds of people who are consumptive, and who are consequently a serious men ace to the community, and whose friends, through sheer ignorance, allaw thain to be at large, and to die inch by inch One of the most astounding features of the consump' tive's character is his perennial hopefulness. He does not think he is going to die, because in the earlier stages of the disease ' he feels no particular pain. This hopefulness is often his doom, because lie sticks to his ordinary, everyday lifo until it is too late even for Nature to do anything with him. * * * *

Some day the doctors will make further discoveries, and may find that Nature is nearly as clever as a man with a degree, and that fresh air, sunshine, exercise, good food, and little clothes are more to be desire 1 as curative properties than medicine. It is not only the consumptive wh? wants fresh air and sunshine and a minimum of stuffiness. It is every kind of physical weakling. Two of the great curses of modern times are doctors' instruments and stuffiness. But it is gratifying to know that there are medical men living now-a-days who are actuated by motives that make for tho good of humanity, oven at the cost of lucre to themselves. As ignorance gives place to wisdom ir. the matter of the scourge of consumption, as well as in other diseases, it is only t,o be expected that there will be less need for surgeons and physicians. Therefore, those medicos who throw light onthe dark? ness are robbing themselves, and may be credited with being even heroic. Doctors Light, Air, Cleanliness are 1 the chief assistants of Doctor Nature, and we hope the time is coming when it may not be necessary to do anything further in the treatment of disease (as well as natural conditions that some human medicos treat as disease) than to use those great physicians' intelligence.