Now, if by curing this disease is meant the production of such changes in the system, that it is no more likely to recur than to attack any other person who has not yet been afflicted with it, then such statements or insinuations as the foregoing are not merely groundless, but absolutely and unqualifiedly false, and their authors ought to know it. For I have had ample opportunity of watching their practice, and following it up to the end, and hence speak what I know, and testify what I have seen. But if they only mean by cure, the _postponement_ of disease for a period of greater or less duration, then the case is altered; though, in that case, what becomes of their skill? No book worthy of the name can be consulted by a consumptive person without his deriving from it many valuable hints, which if duly attended to may assist him in greatly prolonging his days; and the same may be said of the prescriptions of the physician. Yet, I repeat, it is a misnomer, in either case, to call the improvement a cure. Consumptive people continue to live, whenever their lives are prolonged, as the consequence of what they do to promote their general health. One is roused to a little exercise, which somewhat improves his condition, and prolongs his days. Another is induced to pay an increased regard to temperature, and he lives on. Another abandons all medicine, and throws himself into the open arms of Nature, and thus prolongs, for a few months or a few years, his existence. If this is _cure_, then we may have all or nearly all of our consumptives cured, some of them a great many times over. Some few aged practitioners may be found to have cured, during the long years of their medical practice, more than five thousand persons of this description. There is no higher or larger sense than this in which any individual has cured five thousand, or five hundred, or even fifty persons a year, of consumption. On this, a misguided, misinformed public may reply: Many, indeed, revive a little, as the lamp sometimes brightens up in its last moments; but this very revival or flickering only betokens a more speedy and certain dissolution. On the other hand, predisposition to consumption no more renders it necessary that we should die of this disease in early life, at an average longevity of less than thirty years, than the loading and priming of a musket or piece of artillery renders it necessary that there should be an immediate or early explosion. Without an igniting spark there will be no discharge in a thousand years. In like manner, a person may be "loaded and primed" for consumption fifty years, if not even a hundred, without the least necessity of "going off," provided that the igniting spark can be kept away. Our power to protect life, both in the case of consumption and many more diseases, is in proportion to our power to withhold the igniting spark.