The Daily News. TUESDAY, MAY 16, 1911. A STEP FORWARD.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 302, 16 May 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. TUESDAY, MAY 16, 1911. A STEP FORWARD.

Of all civilised persons who die about one in seven die from lung trouble. Everywhere consumption finds its best breeding grounds in crowds, among those who necessarily live an unnatural existence, and those who, however "educated" they may be, are ignorant of the simplest rules of health. The late King, whose great interest in campaigns for the destruction of disease materially helped research, at an English tuberculosis conference was told by enthusiastic medical men that consumption was communicable, curable and preventible. "If preyentible," commented the Peacemaker, "why not prevented?" In Victoria it is proposed 1o institute a campaign against consumption, one of the chief weapons against civilised man's most deadly foe being compulsory notification. Before compulsory notification of every case, incipient or otherwise, can be assured, the general public must be educated as observers, and must further sink their own personal views in their duty to the public. No methods short of house to house visitation could be effective, for the patient who has either incipient or advanced lung disease is hardly ever convinced of its gravity, and his inherent hope frequently prevents him from obtaining relief while cure is possible. If the authorities in Victoria obtain the necessary power to regulate home management—the most important of all in a fight against disease—and if the homes are subsequently conducted with due regard to preventive hygiene, consumption must ultimately go. There is absolutely no question about this point. Medical men have perpetual battles with people's ageold predilections. One instance of what we mean will suffice as illustration. A young patient was lying ill in bod at liis home. A doctor entered, and found every possible inlet for air blocked, the patient smothered in bedclothes, and all light carefully excluded. The physician's first act was to open all windows, the sickroom door, and to take away the screen that had been carefully placed against the fireplace. In deference to the doctor, the patient's parents allowed the child to breathe— while the doctor was present, but on his disappearance every inlet was again closed and all light excluded. Science in this Victorian campaign has got to fight lens of thousands of cases of such ignorance, and it bus to conquer the most common fallacy that drugs and not nature are cures for everything. Science, or a travesty of it, has itself sown the popular belief, and now it is beginning to be sorry. Consumption lives through the centuries because ignorance has nurtured it. Hippocrates, three centuries before the Christian era, called it the greatest and cruellist (if all diseases. Tt is still the greatest and cruellest of all diseases, and the physicians know it can be wiped out if the people will. Eighty thousand people die in Britain every year of consumption, and the majority of the victims arc poorpeople, necessarily ignorant because poor. Tt is not too much to say that interference with the homes of the ignorant, even for their own benefit and for the benefit of the race, would be bitterly opposed. The segregation of a dangerous case, where loving relatives were surely

hastening death, might come forcibly, but it would be a long time before cither pa : ticnt or relatives, sodden with the ignorance of the centuries, could be made to believe that fresh air, sunshine, good food, and nnassisted nature wore the essentials for killing the foe. An incurable disposition is observable in all countries that what lias been proved beneficial for the sick is bad for the well. A physician cited a case in which a man suffering from incipient consumption had been saved. The cure was, of course, the use of air, sunshine, open windows night and day, and so on. Immediately, however, the disease had been arrested, the house was again almost hermetically sealed. The medical man is watching with interest for future developments. Because Britain has 300.000 consumptive people who, according to medical scien-> tists, can be cured, medical science is fighting the battle against the terrible odds of poverty and stuffiness and ignorance, If poverty is reduced, consumption is reduced. The decrease of stuffiness would aim a blow at all disease, and the removal of personal ignorance would in time give the people a clean bill of health. The active interference of the State is absolutely necessary. Tf one considers the single fact that poor law authorities in England and Wales pay out nearly two million pounds annually in the treatment of tuberculosis, one understands that the poor, the underfed, and the necessarily ignorant are the greatest sufferers. The need of compulsory treatment as a national safeguard is also shown, when a great authority avers that of the forty-three million people of Britain only two million are able to pay for treatment out of their own pocket if attacked by lung trouble. If one thinks for a moment of the tremendous task of compulsorily dealing with 300,000 consumptives and of discovering at present unknown cases, one understands the great task ahead of Britain, and has some conception of the work necessary even in fighting consumption in new countries. The proportion suffering in the dominions is only slightly under the proportion of those suffering in older countries, and hence the task is equally difficult. That science has notably decreased the number of canes in all [jinds is the most hopeful sign. When tiip world's states kill poverty, they diminish ignorance. When ignorance disappears, consumption n??c?*arily follows.