Summary.—The preceding review of the problem of tuberculosis may be summarised in a few final statements.
1. Our knowledge of tuberculosis, if fully applied by combined attack on the disease by all known methods, is adequate to secure a great reduction in its prevalence, if not its absolute abolition.
This is true, although certain problems respecting tuberculosis still need elucidation, e.g., as to improved methods of treating the diseases, and of increasing individual immunity during exposure to protracted infection.
2. Domestic protection is at once practicable against infected cows’ milk; and control of this source of infection at its source is also practicable.
3. Of the circumstances favouring the development of pulmonary tuberculosis industrial dust and domestic overcrowding are the most potent. More detailed and systematic supervision of factories and workshops is needed, followed by general adoption of remedies, which would increase industrial efficiency as well as reduce tuberculosis.
4. Tuberculosis is especially a “bedroom infection.” But improvement in housing is a dual problem, and it is a blunder to assume that improved housing, so long as the healthy and tuberculous sick continue to be housed together, will produce a rapid decline in the prevalence of tuberculosis. Hospital provision for the sick is as necessary as improved general housing.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] The substance of two lectures at the Summer School on Tuberculosis, Trudeau Sanatorium, Saranac, N. Y., July, 1919.
CHAPTER X
Child Welfare Work in England [18]
The subject of child welfare, in its chief developments, cannot be separated from that of Public Health, of which it forms a constituent part, though I do not ignore the fact that child welfare is largely dependent also on the extent to which child labor is exploited, and to which expectant and nursing mothers,—as also other mothers whose extra-domestic employment or whose employment for gain is within the home itself,—involves neglect of young children.