COLONEL MATTISON: (acting for General Geo. Wood) The Tuberculosis Section has to deal with a group of patients,—the largest group that the Veterans’ Bureau has to handle. I am sure that we have many men here who are interested in this subject, and I hope we shall have a very free discussion of the subject. We shall begin by having each subject opened, and then the program will be given to general discussion. We shall ask Dr. Stites to open the session on “The Segregation of Cases”. SURGEON T. H. A. STITES (R) U.S.P.H.S.: This question of segregation of Tubercular cases is one that has been vexing all of us for a long while. To understand it at all we have got to review the history of T.B.,—from the ancient times when T.B. was looked upon as a sort of visitation from Heaven, and looked upon as a disgrace to the family, on down to the period when Koch, with his great discovery, found the disease to be infectious. During that time there came on an organized propaganda for the control of T.B. upon the ground that any infectious disease is a preventable disease. This propaganda, as is true of all propaganda, ran to an extreme. It was so hard for those interested in proving that T.B. was an infectious disease to impress it upon the public and to compel them to accept the proposition of its infectiousness, that we went to the extreme of leading everybody to the idea that it was a virulent infection; that it was as contagious possibly as some of the acute infections like scarlatina. There were those who believed that every case should be sent to a T.B. hospital, absolutely isolated from his family and the world in general. Then the pendulum began to swing back, and we came to a sensible conclusion,—that while T.B. is an infectious disease, it is only slightly so to the adult; and if virulent at all, it is so only among children and the adolescent. This being so, we had to change from the separate and isolated hospital for T.B. It has been accepted that every general hospital should receive its quota of T.B. patients, T.B. being one of the most common forms of illness, and that in sending out patients to a strictly T.B. hospital; they should be sent only after the presence of the disease has been fully well proven. The control of T.B. is after all the big problem before all of us in T.B. work today. I have often heard it said that any benefit that comes to the individual is necessarily more or less incidental, and that the big object we are laboring for is the control of the disease and the care of the general public health. Be that as it may, the problem that faces us in the care of the veteran of the World War is the actual care of the sick.