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To the Chairman and Members of the Public Health Committee.
Mr. Chairman, Aldermen and Councillors.
WHY A TUBERCULOSIS DISPENSARY IS REQUIRED ;
AND WHAT IT IS.
When we speak of a Tuberculosis Dispensary we should always recollect
that it is not only an institution for the cure of tuberculosis, but also the
greatest and, as it has been found in various parts of the world, most necessary
and useful instrument hitherto devised by the medical profession for the
cure and prevention of that disease to which the name " Great White Plague
of the North " has been so aptly applied.
But before I fully describe what a tuberculosis dispensary is, it may be
well to say briefly something about the disease, and the amount of it, with
which it will be necessary to deal in Islington.
At one time tuberculosis was considered to be a hereditary disease—and,
therefore, unavoidable—which usually had a fatal termination. Now we know
that it is not hereditary or only so in a negligible degree; that it is preventable;
and that it is not necessarily fatal and is curable, especially if taken
in its earlier stages. When Koch in 1882 discovered the bacillus or germ of
the disease, it at once became apparent to people who studied the question
that tuberculosis was in all probability communicable, and, therefore
was also preventable; likewise that if its germ could be attacked in the
human body it was curable. Both these theories have been most fully and
clearly demonstrated, so that to-day throughout the civilised world, there is
not a single medical man who does not know and believe that such is the case.
The Germ and its spread.—The germ is a vegetable parasite like a
rod in shape; it grows in the body, wherj it destroys certain tissues,
and produces certain poisons known as toxins. These most usually attack
the lungs, where the disease is known as pulmonary phthisis, or in common
phraseology consumption of the lungs ; and less frequently, but nevertheless
in numerous cases, the bones and joints, causing disease of the hip, knee, ankle,
spine, larynx, the glands, and even the meninges of the brain. There is, I
suppose, not one of us sitting around this table who has not at one time or
another lost some relative or friend from one or other of these diseases, and,
therefore, we must be more or less familiar with their fatal results. But I
doubt very much if we have really grasped to the full extent the fact that