But perhaps more striking than collective statistics are the illustrations of unnecessary premature mortality with which history and literature in the Georgian and Victorian period supply us. Many such instances will occur to you. William Pitt died at the age of 47, Charles James Fox at 57. The history of the Brontë family, given the clue that tuberculosis was at work, can be seen on the tablet which I have often read in Haworth Church. Each sister and the brother died in steady succession at intervals of two and three years; the only exception being Charlotte, who had lived much away from home, and who died at the age of 39 of unrestrained vomiting, a condition which probably would not have been allowed to kill the expectant mother today. Robert Burns died at the age of 37, Keats at the age of 26. Lord Byron on his thirty-third birthday, only three years before his death, wrote as a man already “in the sere and yellow leaf” Along life’s road, so dim and dirty, I’ve travelled till I’m three and thirty; And what has this life left for me: Nothing but my thirty-three. Did time permit, the claims of preventive medicine might be illustrated in the facts as to the almost complete annihilation of typhus fever in this country and in Great Britain, under the influence of hospital segregation of each case, of supervision of contacts, and of increased national cleanliness; in the rapid reduction of enteric fever brought about by pure water and milk supplies, the avoidance of sewage-contaminated shell-fish, the control of carriers among food handlers, and the hospital immobilization of cases; and in the almost complete abolition of smallpox, secured by prompt recognition, notification and isolation of each case, the searching out and vaccination of all contacts, and their continued surveillance. The list of medical triumphs, especially in tropical diseases, might easily be extended. I do not fail to remember that respiratory infections have hitherto proved refractory to preventive measures; and that common catarrh, pneumonia, and still more influenza—as also cerebro-spinal fever and poliomyelitis—constitute territories on which the flag of public health has not yet been firmly placed. Tuberculosis must not be thought of in the same category. It is a controllable disease, so soon as physicians, public health authorities and the patients themselves will combine on an adequate scale to adopt measures already within reach. These measures will be less costly than the present position of partial inertia; health is always less costly than disease, and, as Dr. Herman Biggs has often reminded us, can be purchased within natural limits, to the extent which we really desire. This is preëminently true for tuberculosis.