But after a period of incredulity this gave way to delighted confidence. The open-air method would cure, and _did_ cure, and the patients remained cured for years afterward. Our first claims were barely for twenty-five or thirty per cent of the threatened victims. Then we were able to increase it to fifty per cent; sixty, seventy, and finally eighty were successively reached. But with the increase of our power over the cure of this disease came a realization of our knowledge of its limitations. It quickly proved itself to be no sovereign and universal panacea, which would cure all cases, however desperate, or however indiscriminately it was applied. And emphatically it had to be mixed with brains, on the part both of the physician and of the patient. In the first place, the likelihood of a cure depended, with almost mathematical certainty, upon the earliness of the stage at which it was begun. Eight or ten years ago the outlook crystallized itself into the form which it has practically retained since: of cases put under treatment in the very early stage, from seventy to ninety per cent were practical cures; of ordinary so-called "first-stage" cases, sixty to seventy per cent; second-stage cases, or those in whom the disease was well developed, thirty to sixty per cent; and well-advanced cases, fifteen to thirty per cent of apparent cures. _The crux of the whole proposition lies in the early recognition of the disease by the physician_, and the prompt acceptance of the diagnosis by the patient, and his willingness to drop everything and fight intelligently and vigorously for his life. Physicians are now thoroughly awake on this point, and are concentrating their most careful attention and study upon methods of recognition at the earliest possible stages. At the same time those magnificent associations for the study and prevention of tuberculosis, international, national, state, and local,--the greatest of which, the International Tuberculosis Congress, has just honored America, by meeting in Washington,--are straining every nerve to educate the public to understand the importance of recognizing the earliest possible symptoms of this disease, no matter how trivial they may appear, and making every other consideration bend to the fight.