View report page

114
opposites—by filth and squalor, by cold and nakedness, by
the want of the proper necessaries of life, by overcrowding in
ill-constructed, unventilated, and sewage-tainted houses, and,
in a word, by whatever is inimical to the maintenance of a
typical condition of health." It was further observed that
tubercular disease is "susceptible of considerable amelioration,
if not of cure, and ultimate extirpation, under improved
hygienic conditions."
It is now common knowledge that consumption
(using the term in its widest sense), is communicable from
person to person, and from animal to man, and that it
arises in no other way than from some pre-existing
case. It spreads mainly from person to person; but not, as
popularly thought, by the breath of the sick—for in breath
the bacillus is not found—but by inhalation of air, which, in
the vicinity of the sick, abounds with bacilli, derived, in a dry
but vital condition, from expectorated matters {sputa) allowed
to fall upon the ground, or otherwise so disposed of as to
afford opportunity for drying, and passage into the atmosphere
in the form of dust. But the tubercle bacillus is also conveyed
to man from animals in food, especially in the milk
of tuberculous cows, the ingestion of which is frequently
productive of those forms of the disease, peculiar to young
children, known as tabes mesenterica (consumption of the
bowels), tubercular meningitis (inflammation of the membranes
of the brain), hydrocephalus (water on the brain), and the
varieties of the malady comprised, in the classification of the
the Registrar-General, under the heading" Other forms of
Tuberculosis, Scrofula." Further, the flesh of diseased
animals, but in a lesser degree, is also a source of tuberculosis
in man, a subject dealt with in the eleventh and twelfth
monthly reports, in 1898.