In the camps, or sanatoria, for the cure of consumption, these methods
are simply carried a little further, to make up for previous neglect.
The patients sit or lie out of doors all day long, usually in reclining
chairs, in summer under the trees, and in winter on porches, with just
enough roof to protect them from rain or snow. They sleep in tents, or
in shacks, which are closed in only on three sides, leaving the front
open to the south. They dress and undress in a warm room, or the
curtains of the tent are dropped, or the shutters of the shack closed
night and morning until the room is warmed up. In cold climates they
dress day and night almost as if they were going on an arctic relief
expedition, and spend twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four in the
open air.
[Illustration: A TUBERCULOSIS TENT COLONY IN WINTER]
They eat three square meals a day, consisting of everything that is
appetizing, nutritious, and wholesome, with plenty of butter, or other
fats; and in addition, drink from one to three pints of new milk and
swallow from six to twelve raw eggs a day. You would think they would
burst on such a diet, but they don't; they simply gain from two to four
pounds a week, lose their fever and their cough, get rid of their night
sweats, and usually in from two to five weeks are able to be up and
about the camp, taking light exercise. When they have reached their
full, normal, or healthy weight for their height and age, their amount
of food is reduced, but still kept at what would be considered full
diet for a healthy man at hard work. If sick people can be made well by
this open air treatment, those of us that are well ought not be afraid
to have a window open all night.
Two-thirds of the treatment that would cure you of consumption will
prevent your ever having it. While tuberculosis chiefly attacks the
lungs, it is really a disease of the entire body, or system, and cannot
attack you if you will keep yourself strong, vigorous, and clean in
every sense of the word.
How to Recognize the Disease in its Early Stages. To recognize the
disease early is, of course, work for the doctor; but he must be helped
by the intelligence of the patient, or the patient's family, or he may
not see the case until it is so far advanced as to have lost its best
chance of cure. We can now recognize consumption before the lungs are
seriously diseased. Among the most useful methods with children is the
rubbing or scratching of a few drops of the toxin of the tubercle
bacillus, tailed _tuberculin_, into the skin. If the children are
healthy, this will leave no mark, or reddening, at all; but if they have
tuberculosis, in two-thirds of the cases it will make a little reddening
and swelling like a very mild vaccination. But in order to get any good
from this, cases must be brought to a doctor, early, without waiting for
a bad cough, or for night sweats.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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