Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: State control of tuberculosis. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.
18/68 page 14
![than are other organs. It is pro])a])le that in the main this reasoning is correct. But it does not necessarily follow that because the lungs are chiefly involved that they were the seat of the primary infection. Wood- head has shown that infection through the intestinal wall may leave very few traces there, the most im- portant lesions being subsequently found elsewhere in distant organs, such as the thoracic glands. From the time of Koch, many experiments have been tried to produce pulmonary tuberculosis l)y the inhalation of dust containing the living bacilli. Most of these experiments have been unsuccessful. The attemj)t has also Ijeen made to induce it by the inhala- tion of spray, such as was referred to as given off from consumptive patients during sneezing and coughing. These experiments have been more often successful, but not invariably so. It seems to be quite certain from the experiments of Cornet that have ))een referred to, and from the observations of many careful investi- gators, that pulmonary infection is not readily induced. The breating of a few bacilli by a healthy person is not likely to cause the disease. Chance contact with bacilli in the dust of the street, which has Ijeen much dreaded, probably rarely gives rise to the disease. Most of those who have studied the contagion of this disease clinically, as tlie Committee on Collective In- vestigation, Heron, Martin, Russell, and Cornet, believe that close and prolonged contact is necessary, in most cases, to produce infection. Infection is not carried far by the air. This accords with the known facts in regard to the transmission of other diseases. Scarlet fever and diphtheria do not pass from one tenement to another in the same house unless there is an actual](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21226209_0018.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
