t, although the Jew in his own home, synagogue, or in his
social reunions, is not exposed to tubercular emanations, and that he
has less chance of contracting the disease from tuberculous meats, he
is, after all, a theatre-goer; a pretty constant inhabitant of the
sleeping-car and hotel, as a commercial traveler and general merchant;
and that, on the whole, he eats the same food, breathes the air and dust
of the same streets, and drinks the same milk and water as the
Christian, and, as observed by Dr. Billings, cooking destroys the
bacillus in meats. So that the comparative exposure in this
country--where the practice is not as prevalent as in Germany of eating
raw minced-meat sandwiches--existing between the Jew and the Christian
to tubercular infection from meat are about equal. The records of the
Jewish Hospital of New York gives, out of 28,750 persons admitted, only
44.17 per 1000 of its admissions as being due to consumption; while
those of the Roosevelt Hospital, out of 25,583 admissions, gives a per
1000 of 67.93.

From what is known of the relation of syphilis to consumption, not only
as affecting the primary individual, but the subsequent generations of
the same, and the known greater exemption of the Jew to syphilitic
infection, owing to the protecting influence of circumcision, it is safe
to assert that therein is to be found one of the main reasons of the
exemption of that race to consumption. If we but look at the
geographical distribution of phthisis and the history of its progress,
we shall find that it has had syphilis as its _avant courrier_ on more
than one occasion. Lancereaux, in his "Distribution of Pulmonary
Phthisis," points to the fact that where consumption has made its
greatest ravages, and where it has nearly depopulated one of the great
divisions of the globe,--namely, the groups of islands in the Pacific
Ocean,--the disease had no existence at the beginning of the present
century. Syphilis, scrofula, and a quick, galloping consumption have,
since the last ninety years, taken off the greater part of the
population. The same course of transition from the best of physical
conditions to racial deterioration and extinction from the same relative
condition of causes--syphilis, scrofula, and phthisis--has been observed
among the open-air dwellers of the New Mexican Plains, in the mountains
of Arizona, and on the arid wastes of the Colorado Desert, where the
appearance of consumption cannot be attri