When we remember that the careful investigations of the various
dispensaries for the treatment of tuberculosis in our larger cities, New
York, Boston, Cleveland, report that on an average twenty to thirty per
cent of all children living in the same room or apartment with a
consumptive member of their family are found to show some form of
tuberculosis, it will be seen how well worth while, from every point of
view, this provision for the removal and sanatorium treatment of the
poorer class of these unfortunates would be. These dispensaries now
have, as a most important part of their campaign against the disease,
one or more visiting nurses, who, whenever a patient with tuberculosis
is brought into the dispensary, visit him in his home, show him how to
ventilate and light his rooms as well as may be, give practical
demonstrations of the methods of preventing the spread of the disease,
advise him as to his food, and see that he is supplied with adequate
amounts of milk and eggs, and, finally, round up all the children of the
family and any adults who are in a suspicious condition of health, and
bring them to the dispensary for examination. Distressing as are these
findings, reaching in some cases as high as fifty and sixty per cent of
the children, they have already saved hundreds of children, and
prevented hundreds of others from growing up crippled or handicapped.
It must be remembered that the tubercle bacillus causes not merely
disease of the lungs in children but also a large majority of the
crippling diseases of the bones, joints, and spine, together with the
whole group of strumous or scrofulous disorders, and a large group of
intestinal diseases and of brain lesions, resulting in convulsions,
paralysis, hydrocephalus, and death. The battle-ground of the future
against tuberculosis is the home.
We speak of the churchyard as "haunted," and we recoil in horror from
the leper-house or the cholera-camp. Yet the deadliest known hotbed of
horrors, the spawning ground of more deaths than cholera, smallpox,
yellow fever, and the bubonic plague combined, is the dirty floor of the
dark, unventilated living-room, whether in city tenement or village
cottage, where children crawl and their elders spit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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