The tenement and tuberculosis : an address / by S. A. Knopf ; delivered before a conference held under the auspices of the Tenement House Committee, of the Charity Organization Society, New York, February 20, 1900.

  • Sigard Adolphus Knopf
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The tenement and tuberculosis : an address / by S. A. Knopf ; delivered before a conference held under the auspices of the Tenement House Committee, of the Charity Organization Society, New York, February 20, 1900. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    odor in this room, a distinct smell of disease mingled with the odor of cooking. We ask to have the window open, but the patient fears the draft. He is a hus- band and the father of six children of whom two have died within the last year. The youngest of the remaining children is a few months old ; the eld- est, a girl of ten, attends to the household duties while the mother goes out to work. We greet our consumptive friend lying there, bid him cheer, ancL tell him we came to investigate his case. He faintly smiles, and we ask him to tell his story. In a feeble voice, interrupted by fits of coughing, he tells us that up to two years ago he was a strong and vigorous man, he had a good position as a mechanic, lived in a better tenement than now, and drank only occasionally when life at home became too dull. Once he caught a severe cold. He went to a doctor. A few weeks of rest and some' medicine and he got well. After some months another cold ;—the same treatment, the same result. And then again a cold, and so on, until the periods between the times when he could labor and earn, became longer and longer. The savings from better times disappeared gradually ; a cheaper tenement was sought ; the visits to the doctor were given up, and the patient finally ceased to work entirely. To go to the dispensary was too much of an exertion. The faithful wife nursed him tenderly, but soon all the savings were gone. The burial of the two little ones—one having died of bowel complaint and the other of brain trouble—had cost so much that the mother decided to go out to work in order to support the family. While listening to the pitiful story we look around the scantily furnished rooms. The babies are playing on the dirty floor touching everything with their little hands, put- ting their fingers in their mouths, and inhaling the dust laden with disease germs. When we consider that this case has only been reported a few weeks ago, and that until then the patient had hardly taken any care with his expectora- tions, can we wonder that two of the children died within a few months, one from bowel^eomplaint—which probably was nothing else than intestinal tuber, culosis—and the other from brain trouble, which is only another name for tuber- culous meningitis. The remaining little ones look pale and underfed. The little mother preparing the evening meal has seemingly a better appearance. She has to do so much running out in the street to buy the provisions for the family that she gets more air, and if the father does not feel too badly she wheels out the baby sometimes. Yet to the experienced eye .there are already traces of overwork in this delicate child organism. The precautions the patient takes now with his expectoration consist in having placed before him on the floor a cuspidor partially filled with some antiseptic fluid. Owing to his weakness he does not always succeed in depositing his sputum exactly in the center and sometimes he even fails to hit the vessel at all. We call his attention to this lack of precaution and advise him to use a light mug which he can bring near to him, or moist rags which he should have burned in the eve- ning on his wife's return. We bid adieu to this interesting family to visit another case which had been reported two flights higher up. But on the next floor we pass a door wide open and 3