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27
The Parish of Saint Mary, Stoke Newington.
PRECAUTIONS AGAINST CONSUMPTION.
(i.e., Tuberculosis of the Lungs.)
Although some individuals are especially prone to consumption
everyone is liable to fall a victim to it. Most people have a natural
power of resistance to the disease, and it is in the power of everyone
to increase or diminish this resistance.
Consumption (with other forms of Tuberculosis) causes one death
in every tight in this country, and gives rise to a vast amount of
suffering, often long continued.
Consumption is, to a large extent, a preventable disease. It
mostly prevails in damp, dirty, ill-ventilated, overcrowded and badlylighted
houses and workshops. Eepeated colds, intemperance,
unwholesome and insufficient food, attacks of measles, whoopingcough
and typhoid fever, also specially favour the appearance of the
disease.
Consumption is caused by a germ or microbe derived from some
person or animal already suffering from the disease. The germ gets
into the air, food or drink, and thereby gains access to the lungs or
intestines of human beings.
It is most usually spread by the spit of consumptive persons.
Where the spit lodges, it dries and afterwards, gets lifted up as dust
into the air, the germ thereby reaches the lungs of others.
Such spit should, therefore, never be allowed to get dry. For
that reason it should not be spat on the floors of a house or public
conveyance or into a handkerchief, but either into pieces of rag or
paper, which should be at once burned, or into a spittoon or small
portable spit bottle containing water. The spittoon or bottle should
be carefully emptied down the w.c. every morning and evening, then
scalded and recharged with fresh water.