The prevention of consumption : a mode of prevention founded on a new theory of the nature of the tubercle-bacillus / by C. Candler.

  • Candler, C.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The prevention of consumption : a mode of prevention founded on a new theory of the nature of the tubercle-bacillus / by C. Candler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    over-estimated. Or rather, it would seem that a miscon- ception exists as to the nature of the relations between consanguinity and consumption ; for, although it is obvious enough that consumption attends upon particular families through successive generations, it does not follow that the occurrence of the disease is a consequence of blood-relation- ship. The tie of blood has always been looked upon as a factor of greater or less importance among the causes of consumption, but is not the environment of the members of a family occupying the same house for generations more concerned than kindred in the implication of the family ? Has heredity in any shape, or has locality, determined the incidence of phthisis in these families ? Has not the family house been tainted instead of the family blood ? From data which will be given, I conclude that the share hereditary tendency, or predisposition, or soil, has had in the whole mortality from consumption has been exceedingly limited—fractional, indeed. For it is almost an inferential certainty from the facts that any one of these so-called consumptive families could at any time have broken (what has appeared to be) the entail of earl}'- death to many of them, by simply removing from the family house to a house free from a local bacillary malaria in all the bedrooms ; or even by abandoning the malarious bedrooms in the old family house ; and, conversely, that a family in which consumption has been unknown, by taking a house left by a consumptive family, and occupying the same rooms in it under the same or essentially similar conditions to those obtaining when they were occu])ied by the consumptive family, would become converted into a consumptive family in duo process of time; and chance would determine which of the new occupants of the house would bo the first to be efficiently infected in its malarious bedrooms. In fine, the view here taken of the immense