Consumption is a relentless monster, and insidious in his approaches. He spares not the high or the low. Oftener known in the hovel, he fails not to visit dwellers in palaces. He paints the cheek of the infant, youth, maiden, the middle-aged, and the aged with the false glow of health. The delicate and beautiful are his common subjects.
Tupper wrote with an understanding when he penned the following:—
“Behold that fragile form of delicate, transparent beauty,
Whose light blue eye and hectic cheek are lit by the bale-fires of decline;
All droopingly she lieth, as a dew-laden lily,
Her flaxen tresses rashly luxuriant, dank with unhealthy moisture;
Hath not thy heart said of her, ‘Alas! poor child of weakness’?”
Yes, the monster “Decline” seeks particularly the fair-skinned, of “transparent beauty,” and those of the “light blue eye and flaxen hair,” for his victims. Nor are the illiterate alone his subjects, but men of the most talented minds, men versed in arts, sciences, and belles-lettres, professors of hygiene and physiology, and the very practitioners of the art of medicine themselves, are often the shining marks of the insidious monster whom they by erudition diligently seek to repel.
Because of the too prevalent belief of the invincibleness of consumption, it has been neglected more than any other disease. The victims to its wiles have hoped against hope, while the enemy has woven his web quietly and flatteringly around them.
You must first be warned of his earliest aggression.
Signs of his Approach.
He is a deceiver. Let us be wary of him.
We have been too negligent in this matter. Let us remember that prevention is far better than cure.
The slight fatigue on the least exertion we have counted as “nothing.” The hectic flush of the cheeks is too often mistaken for a sign of health. The cursory pains of the chest, or left side, or under the shoulder-blades, are disregarded, or, if noticed at all, are mentioned as though “of no account.” The slight hacking cough is scarcely heeded; for do not people often cough without having consumption, and without raising blood? True, true; and this is the stronghold of the deceiver.