This is indeed one of the principal reasons why tuberculosis of the lungs still continues to carry off so many victims every year,-- because people are afraid to learn the truth. They dare not put the question to a definite issue and refuse to believe the possibility that certain disturbing symptoms represent developing tuberculosis. They defer seeing an expert; they take this and that suggestion from friends; they buy cough remedies which {177} they see advertised, sometimes they tinker with so-called "consumption cures." After a while an advance of their symptoms makes it absolutely necessary to see a physician but often by this time their disease has progressed from an incipient case rather easy to be treated and with an excellent prognosis to a more advanced stage at which cure is ever so much more difficult; or by this time it may even prove that their strength has been seriously sapped and they have not enough resistive vitality left to bring about reaction toward the cure. The all-important thing for all those who have at any time lived near consumptives, whether relatives or others--for the disease is almost invariably acquired and not hereditary--or who have worked for any prolonged period in more or less intimate contact with those who had a chronic cough or who subsequently developed tuberculosis, is that on the first symptom that is at all suspicious they should make up their minds to have the question as to whether they have tuberculosis or not definitely settled and that they should be ready to do what they are told in the matter. The first symptom is not a persistent cough as so many think, nor continued loss of {178} weight, which is an advanced sign as a rule, but a continued rapidity of pulse for which no non-pulmonary reason can be found.