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110
preventive medicine in this country with regard to Tuberculosis,
and more particularly with what is being done at the present
time for the eradication of the malady in the Metropolitan
Borough of Deptford.
In this process we must assume that other authorities will
be brought to see eye to eye with us and work in the same
earnest manner, for it is not fair for one local authority to hatch
out cases which migrate elsewhere to be cured by other authorities
at the expense of and danger to the receiving authority.
Before you can fight it is necessary to come to grips with
your enemy, and obviously, before preventive medicine can do
anything to lessen the tuberculosis mortality, the habitations,
human and otherwise, of the tubercular parasite must be sought.
In the past, one of the great obstacles with which sanitarians
have had to contend—in their efforts to lessen the high
mortality from tuberculosis—has been the difficulty in getting
into touch with the patient or host of the bacillus before he or
she has passed the early curable stage. For at this juncture
the patient is acting as a focus of infection to all in the immediate
neighbourhood, laying down the seeds of a multitude of further
cases. In fact so reluctant are people to acknowledge being
affected with consumption that within comparatively modern
times the family physician, in deference to the wishes of the
relatives of a deceased person, has frequently been prevailed upon
to sign a death certificate as Pneumonia, or Broncho-pneumonia,
when Phthisis would have been the more correct term.
With the establishment of anti-tuberculosis dispensaries
with whole time officers, and the dissemination of knowledge,
people will be taught that it is to their own interest, and that
of their family to seek medical advice in all doubtful cases of
illness and more especially when there is any possibility of
such illness developing into consumption. By means of the