berculosis an attendant nurse, whose
duty it was to visit the patients at their homes and advise and instruct
them as to improvements in their methods of living, ventilation, food,
and the prevention of infection.

It was not long before these intelligent women began to bring back
reports of other cases in the same family. Now the procedure is
regularly adopted, whenever a case presents itself, of rounding up the
remainder of the family group for examination, with the astounding
result that where a mother or father is tuberculous, from twenty to
sixty per cent of the children will be found to be suffering from some
form of the infection. Instances of three infected children out of five
living in the same room with a tuberculous mother are actually on
record.

No one can practice long in any of our great climatic health resorts for
tuberculosis, like Colorado or the Pacific Slope, without coming across
scores of painful and distressing instances of children of tuberculous
parents dying suddenly in convulsions from tuberculous meningitis, or by
a wasting diarrh[oe]a from tuberculosis of the bowels, or from a violent
attack of distention of the bowels due to tuberculous peritonitis. The
favorite breeding-place of the tubercle bacillus is unfortunately in the
home.

On the other hand, while the vast majority of cases of so-called
hereditary tuberculosis are due to direct infection, and may be
prevented by proper disposal of the sputum and other methods for
avoiding contagion, there is probably a hereditary element in the spread
of tuberculosis to this degree: that, inasmuch as all of us have been
exposed to the attack and invasion of the tubercle bacillus, not merely
scores, but hundreds of times, and have been able to resist or throw
off that attack without apparent injury, the development of an invasion
of the tubercle bacillus sufficiently extensive to endanger life is, in
nine cases out of ten, in itself a proof of lowered resisting power on
the part of the patient. This may be, and often is, only temporary, due
to overwork, underfeeding, overconfinement, or that form of gradual
suffocation which we politely term inadequate ventilation.

In a certain percentage of cases, however, it is due to a chronic lack
of vigor and vitality; a lowering of the whole systemic tone, which may
have existed from birth. In that case it is hardly to be expected that
such an individual, becoming a parent, will be able to transmit to hi