TUBERCULOSIS POINTS THE MORAL

No circumstance has been more successful in impressing the great importance of fresh air and adequate ventilation upon the public mind than the success which has attended the open air cure for consumption. This is a mode of treatment of comparatively recent adoption in America, but it is by this time generally recognized as really the only possible cure for tuberculosis. The mortality from this disease is greater than any except pneumonia; another disease that proper breathing habits will do much to avert. In America one person in every nine dies of tuberculosis; and of the deaths which occur between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, one-third are due to the great white plague. We give these figures on the authority of Professor Irving Fisher of Yale, who is Secretary of the New Haven AntiTuberculosis Association. His interest in this disease is that of one who has had it, and who has cured it by the open air treatment. Of the authors of this book, one has had an experience similar to Professor Fisher. There is nothing academic about this insistence on the need of fresh air and proper breathing habits; literally, and in the fullest degree, it is a question of life and death whether you shall breathe properly, and have good air to breathe, or whether you shall not.