To secure this favorable result two conditions of living are necessary but they must be above all persisted in for a considerable period. First there must be an abundance of fresh air with rest during the advancing stage or whenever there are acute symptoms present, and secondly an abundance of good food which will provide a store of nutritive energy and make the resistive vitality as high as possible. Curiously enough this "fresh air and good food" treatment for the disease was recognized as the sheet anchor of the therapeutics of consumption as long ago as Galen's time, the end of the second century, when that distinguished Greek physician was practising at Rome. Nearly eighteen hundred {171} years ago Galen suggested that he had tried many remedies for what he called phthisis, the Greek equivalent of our word consumption or wasting away, and had often thought that he had noted a remedial value in them, but after further experience he felt that the all-important factors for cure were fresh air and good food. He even went so far as to say that he thought the best food of the consumptive or the phthisical, as he called them, was milk and eggs. A great deal of water has flowed under the bridge of medical advance since his time and at many periods since physicians have been sure that they had valuable remedies for consumption; yet here we are practically back at Galen's conclusion more than fifty generations after his time, and we are even inclined to think of this mode of treatment as comparatively new, as it is in modern history. The influence on consumption of the will to get well when once aroused was typically exemplified in the career of the well-known London quack of the beginning of the nineteenth century, St. John Long. He set himself up as having a sure cure for consumption. He was a charlatan of the deepest dye whose one idea was to make money, and who knew {172} nothing at all about medicine in any way. He took a large house in Harley Street and fitted it up for the reception of people anxious to consult him. For some seasons every morning and afternoon the public way was blocked up with carriages pressing to his door. Nine out of ten of his patients were ladies and many of them were of the highest rank; fashion and wealth hastened to place themselves and their daughters at the mercy of the pretender's ignorance. His mode of treatment was by inhalation. He assured his patients that the breathing in of this medicated vapor would surely cure their pulmonary disease, and because others were intent on going they went; many of them were greatly benefited for a time and these so-called cures proved a bait for many other patients.