Proceedings of the quarter-centennial celebration of the establishment of the Michigan State Board of Health : held at Detroit, Michigan, August 9, 1898.

Michigan. State Board of Health

Date:: 1898

Credit: Proceedings of the quarter-centennial celebration of the establishment of the Michigan State Board of Health : held at Detroit, Michigan, August 9, 1898. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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$ordinary circ-umstancefc! of the occasion, find entrance. The exceptional promptitude witli which the disease was stamped out after its discovery iit McHenry, ^liss.. May 20, is an encouraging; example of energetic work. And what may now he said of the crusade that has but just now begun, as it were, against tuberculosis, omitting any attem]>ts to discuss that {•base of it which has been in progress for several years in the destruction of cattle—further than to rivet attention, if possible, to the liability of childrthi to intcstuial tuberculosis, and since children are the great milk consumers—to insist upon this fact as a sufiicient justilication of the destruction of tuberculous cows, and for the most rigid supervision of the milk supj)ly by the sanitary authorities. Every sanitarian readily recalls to mind the discovery of the fostering infiuence of tuberculosis by a damj) soil, in 1S()2, by our always-to-be- remembered i)ioneer in sanitary work, the late Henry I. Bowditch, and recognizes the immense benefit of that discovery in the promotion of soil drainage. But our ])resent reference is more particularly to Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus fifteen years ago. And since the recog- nition of the communicability of the disease by the inhalation of the bacilli from the dried dust of the s])utum of consum])tives, the question of how to prevent this danger with the least possible inconvenience to the afllicted is one of the most important problems of practical sanitation. That there, are various means adaptable to the ditferent conditions of exposure and the proper care of consumptives, subject to .sanitary super- vision, every sanitarian knows. And the salutary results are proven by the dimipishing death rate from consumption wherever it has been imposed. Moreover, the restricti\*e measures of sanitary authorities in this regard have been an educational force among the people at large. And no persons have become more keenly alive to the danger of tuber- culosis sputum than consumi)tives themselves, who would be the last to afilict in like manner those who are dear to them or other persons. While, therefore, their sensitiveness in this regard should always be re- spected, the day has gone b}’—even with them—when such sensitive- ness should be an obstacle to the protection of human life. Consump- tion is no longer regarded as a family disease—much less a community disease—but a personal -one: a disease that is ordinarily' contracted by inhaling the dust of dried s])iitum, aud above all Iw persons whose re- sisting powers are below par from any cause, though no person, however well, can be considered absolutely exempt from the danger of such ex- posure. The tendcnci/ to constim])tion is constitutional weakness from any cause, no more likely to be “inherited” from consumptive ])arents than from dyspeptic ])arents, and not as likely from either as from the stifling air and physical restraints of some schools. Besides, the tendency to dis- ease from these sources extends to other diseases as well as to consump- tion. Disease germs are beyond question the chief antagonizing force to human existence upon the earth. They belong to a great family of vegetable organisms whose oftice in the role of living things is, in gen- eral, beneficent, but, as in the higher orders of vegetable organisms, some are poisonous, and these are the “])athogenic microbes”—disease germs. Of their life-history there is nothing known beyond their ])res- ent aspect. Xo evolutionist has yet instituted impiiry into their primitive form—if they were ever of any other than as now observed—or ven-$