Addison Darre Crabtre

CONSUMPTION (PHTHISIS PULMONALIS).

CONSUMPTION A MONSTER!—UNIVERSAL REIGN.—SIGNS OF HIS APPROACH.—WARNINGS.—BAD POSITIONS.—SCHOOL-HOUSES.—ENGLISH THEORY.—PREVENTIVES.—AIR AND SUNSHINE.—SCROFULA.—A JOLLY FAT GRANDMOTHER.—“WASP WAISTS.”—CHANGE OF CLIMATE.—“TOO LATE!”—WHAT TO AVOID.—HUMBUGS.—COD-LIVER OIL.—STRYCHNINE WHISKEY.—A MATTER-OF-FACT PATIENT.—SWALLOWING A PRESCRIPTION.—SIT AND LIE STRAIGHT.—FEATHERS OR CURLED HAIR.—A YANKEE DISEASE.—CATARRH AND COLD FEET, HOW TO REMEDY.—“GIVE US SOME SNUFF, DOCTOR.”—OTHER THINGS TO AVOID.—A TENDER POINT.

Phthisis Pulmonalis is consumption of the lungs, which is the common acceptation of the term consumption. Phthisis is from the Greek, meaning to consume. This fearful disease, from the earliest period in the history of medicine to the present day, has proved more destructive of human life than any other in the entire catalogue of ills to which frail humanity is heir. In Great Britain, one in every four dies of consumption; in France, one in five. In the United States, especially in New England, the number who die annually by this fearful disease is truly startling! One in every three! One reason for this fatality is because of the prevailing and erroneous idea that it is inevitably a fatal disease.

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.Consumption is a disease which is not entirely confined to the lungs. It is often a depraved condition of the system, particularly the blood. There is a “consumption of the blood,” and a variety of morbid phenomena, which cannot be expressed in the single word consumption. It not unusually results in a scrofulous predisposition. An hereditary predisposition may or may not be the cause. If the former, its development must depend upon some exciting cause, which will be mentioned hereafter. The intermarrying of persons of like temperaments and constitutional dispositions inevitably results in children of scrofulous and consumptive diathesis.

A NATURAL POSITION.AN UNNATURAL POSITION.

A neglected cold, cough, or catarrh may soon develop this fatality. The peculiar changes in females at certain periods of life often awaken the slumbering enemy. Teething in infancy not unfrequently develops the scrofulous element, and a wasting of the system—either marasmus or tabes mesenterica—follows, which, under the best treatment, may prove fatal.

The slip-shod, doubled-up way that many people have of lying, sitting, and standing, are conducive to consumption.

Badly-ventilated school-houses have heretofore been a source of great injury to children, developing scrofula and consumption in constitutions where it might have remained latent during their lifetime. Every reflecting parent should rejoice in the improvements which have been made during the last few years in the matter of ventilation in buildings, particularly in churches and school-rooms, although janitors, porters, and teachers have as yet too limited ideas on the subject of wholesome air. The dry furnaces are a very objectionable feature, and not conducive to health.

Early Symptoms.—Fatigue on the least exertion; a languid, tired feeling in the morning; rosy tint of one or both cheeks during the latter part of the day, caused by unoxygenized blood rushing to the surface; swelling of the glands of the neck, or elsewhere; enlarged joints; paleness of the lips; areola under the eyes; sensitiveness to the air; chills running over the body; taking cold easily; catarrhal symptoms; premature development of the intellect; and early physical maturity, are among its initiatory indications. Also, when the disease is located in the lungs, spitting of white, frothy mucus, or blood, with catarrhal symptoms; cough, which is noticed by others before by the patient; hacking on retiring, or early in the morning; varied appetite; tickling in the throat; short breath on exertion, with rapid pulse.

Second Stage.—Cough, and difficult breathing; increased difficulty of lying on one side; sharp, short pains; diminution of monthly period; swelling of the lower extremities, leaving corrugation on removing the hose and garters at night; raising greenish yellow matter, with (at times) hard, curd-like substance; sweating easily (sometimes the reverse); night sweats; restless, feverish, either dull or sharp bright cast to the eyes. Sputa increases to the

Third Stage.—Diarrhoea not unusually supervenes; spitting of blood; the person emaciates rapidly; the face changes from a bloated to a cadaverous appearance, with hectic fever; the patient faints easily; debility increases with the cough, or hÆmoptosis occurs often, until death finally closes the scene.

These are merely some of the external symptoms. Let the patient mark them, not so much to fear, as to provide against them. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. I caution you against the causes, and give you the benefit of my extensive experience with this disease, both in New England and three years in the South, that you may avoid its development by attention to rules for health and longevity.

If this fearful disease was better understood by the people, it would prove far less destructive of human life. Undomesticated animals do not die of it; domesticated ones do. What does that imply? That the people have engendered the disease! Let the “people,” then, take the first step in preventing its ravages.

Theory of Consumption.

At a sitting of the Academy of Medicine at London, Dr. Priory read a paper on the treatment of phthisis, in which he developed the following propositions:—

1. Pulmonary phthisis is a combination of multifarious variable phenomena, and not a morbid unity.

2. Hence there does not and cannot exist a specific medicine against it.

3. Therefore neither iodine nor its tincture, neither chlorine, nor sea salt, nor tar, can be considered in the light of anti-phthisical remedies.4. There are no specifics against phthisis, but there are systems of treatment to be followed in order to conquer the pathological states which constitute the disorder.

5. In order to cure consumptive patients, the peculiar affections under which they labor must be studied, and appreciated, and counteracted by appropriate means.

6. The tubercle cannot be cured by the use of remedies, but good hygienic precautions may prevent its development.

7. The real way to relieve, cure, or prolong the life of consumptive patients, is to treat their various pathological states, which ought to receive different names, according to their nature.

8. Consumption, thus treated, has often been cured, and oftener still life has been considerably prolonged.

9. Phthisis should never be left to itself, but always treated as stated above.

10. The old methods, founded on the general idea of a single illness called phthisis, are neither scientific nor rational.

11. The exact diagnosis of the various pathological states which constitute the malady will dictate the most useful treatment for it.

Preventives of Consumption.

If a man desires a house erected, he consults a carpenter, or if a first class residence, he employs an architect. If our watch gets out of repair, we take it to a skilful jeweller. If our boots become worn, want tapping, they are sent to the cobbler. But how many people there are, who, when the complicated mechanism of the system gets out of order,—which they cannot look into as they can their watch or old boots,—first try to patch themselves up, instead of employing a professional “cobbler of poor health and broken constitutions.”

Before me are Wistar’s, Wilson’s, and Gray’s Works on Anatomy. I have read them, or Krause’s, more than twenty years. They contain all that has been discovered relative to the human system. But I do not know it all. I never can. I doubt if the man lives who knows it all. Then here is “Physiology,” which treats of the offices or various functions of the system. I do not comprehend it all. “Great ignoramus!” Nobody is perfected in it. Next is Pathology, which treats of diseases, their causes, nature, and symptoms. Then there are Materia Medica, Chemistry, and much more to be learned before one can become competent to prescribe for diseases safely.

CORRECT POSITION.INCORRECT POSITION.

Can a carpenter, or any mechanic, a lawyer, minister, or other than he who devotes his whole powers to the theory and practice of medicine, be intrusted with the precious healths and lives of individuals, about which he knows little or nothing? Or can I, in a few chapters, instruct such in the art of curing complicated diseases? O, no, no. But I can do something better for such. I can tell you how to avoid diseases. I am quite positive of it. I should wrong you, and endanger your lives by the deception thus put forth. There are some books written on the subject which are useful to the masses in the same manner in which I trust this will prove, by instructing in the ways of health, and warnings against that which is injurious; but there are far too many issued which are but a damage to the public by their false claims of posting everybody in the knowledge of curing all diseases, particularly that complicated one termed consumption.

Among the preventives of this fell destroyer I enumerate,—

First, Plenty of God’s pure, free air; and second, sunshine. These are indispensable. He who prescribes for a patient without looking into this matter has yet to learn the first principle of the healing art.

A lady recently came to my office with her son for medical advice. She was a robust, matronly looking individual, who might turn the scale at one hundred and eighty pounds, while the twelve-year-old boy was almost a dwarf, pale and delicate. The contrast was astounding.

“Madam,” I said, “I perceive that your son sleeps in a room where no sunshine permeates by day;” for I could liken the pale, sickly-looking fellow to nothing but a vegetable which had sprouted in a dark, damp cellar. A gardener can tell such a vegetable, or plant, which has been prematurely developed away from air and sunshine. And though she looked astonished at my Œdipean proclivity in solving riddles, it was nothing marvellous that a physician should detect a result in a patient which a clodhopper might discover in a cabbage.

“Yes, sir,” she finally answered, “he always sleeps in a room where the sunlight don’t enter; but I did not think it was that which made him so pale-like; besides, I have taken him to several doctors, and they said nothing about it; but their prescriptions did him no good, and I am discouraged.”Such stoicism was unpardonable, but I said in reply,—

“Take your son into a light airy room, to sleep. Try a healthy plant in the cell where you have so wrongfully intombed him, and observe how speedily the color and strength will depart from it. When you can come back and assure me of his change of apartment, I will prescribe for him.”

She went away, repeating to herself, as if to impress it firmly upon her mind,—

“Put a plant into his room—plant into Johnny’s room.”

The lady afterwards returned, saying that she was sorry that the plant had died, but was glad to say that Johnny was better.

It is a daily occurrence for physicians to see patients who are dying by inches from the above cause; nor are they the low foreigners alone, but, like my stoical one hundred and eighty pounder, of American birth, and without excuse for their ignorance.

Do not sleep or live in apartments unventilated, or where the life-giving sunshine does not penetrate during some portion of the day. It is living a lingering death. If the patient is scrofulous, let him or her employ such remedies as are known to remove the predisposition, or seek aid from some physician who has cured scrofula. The regular practitioner seldom desires such cases. One who has devoted much time to scrofula and chronic diseases should be preferred. I think chronic practice should become a separate branch in medicine as much as surgery is fast becoming. Take the disease in season. Do not neglect colds, coughs, and catarrh.

Persons of a low state of blood, who are weak and debilitated, should wear flannels the year round—thinner in summer than in winter; keep the feet dry—avoid “wafer soles,”—and the body clean, but beware of what Artemus Ward termed “too much baths.” Employ soap and a small quantity of water, with a plenty of dry rubbing, till you get a healthy circulation to the surface.Mothers, see to the solitary and other habits of your daughters. Fathers, instruct your sons in the laws of nature, and of their bodies. Do you understand?

See our youth swept off by the thousands annually, for want of proper care and instruction!...

A jolly fat Grandmother.

“Wasp Waists.”—This is what I heard a fine-looking though tobacco-sucking gentleman utter, as with his companion he passed two young and fashionably dressed ladies on the street recently.

HOW WASP WAISTS ARE MADE.

So I fell into a reverie, in which I called up the image of a fat, jolly old lady whom I knew as my “grandmarm.” She had a waist half as large around as a flour barrel.

“O, horrid creature!” exclaims a modern belle.

But, then, my grandmother could breathe! You cannot—only half breathe! And my “grandmarm” had a fresh color to her cheeks and lips, and a good bust, till she was over sixty years of age, and she lived to be almost a hundred years old. You won’t live to see a third of that time. Did our grandfathers or mothers die of consumption? O, no. Still they lived well—mine did. When I see a modern mince pie, it quickly carries my mind back to childhood days, when I think of a little boy who thought grandmothers were gotten up expressly to furnish nice cakes and mince pies for the rising generation.

O, but she was jolly—and so were her pies!

An Irish blunderer once said, “Ah, ye don’t see any of the young gals of the present day fourscore and tin years ould;” and probably we should not see many of our present “crop” if we should survive that age.

Drs. A., B., and C., tell me how many ladies who visit your offices can take a full, deep breath. “Not one in a score or two!” So I thought.

Lungs which are not used in full become weak and tender. Do you have sore places about your chest? Practise inflating your lungs with pure air through the nostrils,—where God first breathed the breath of life,—and give room for the lungs to expand, and the “sore places” will all disappear after a time. See my article on breathing. Put it into steady, moderate practice, and the result will be beneficial beyond all conception.

Consumption is Curable.

“Is it true that consumption of the lungs is ever cured?” is a question which is often seriously asked.

“O, yes,” I reply.

“What are the proofs?”

Where on dissection we find cicatrices,—places in the lungs where tubercles have existed, sloughing out great cavities, which have healed all sound, the scar only remaining—what then? Here is positive proof that consumption had been at work, was repelled by some means, and the patient had recovered, subsequently dying of some other disease, or from accident.

Such is the fact in many cases. It is an error—fatal to thousands—to suppose that the lungs, of all substance in the body, cannot be healed. Yet it is a fact patent to most educated physicians, that many cases of consumption are cured in this country, while others are prolonged, and the patient made comfortable during many years.

Change of climate may be much towards saving a patient. Before deciding upon such change, consult your physician. Ought not he to know best? A climate adapted to one constitution may be quite unsuited to another. What a wise provision in Providence in giving this little world a variety of climates! There are certain portions of the States and world where consumption seldom prevails. The climate of California and the western prairies, as also some portions of the South away from the coast, is less conducive of lung and throat diseases than the more bleak and changeable climate of New England and the Northern States. A change is only beneficial in those cases where there is a mere deficiency of vitality in the system. If the disease depends upon a scrofulous or other taint in the system, one gains little by going from home. Change of climate does not alter the condition of the system materially, so much as it relieves one from atmospheric pressure, reducing thereby the demands upon his small stock of vitality,—just as some places are less expensive in which to live, and your funds hold out longer. The writer resided in the Southern States during three cold seasons, and carefully studied the effects of changes. He has two brothers in California, who, during the past ten years, have often written respecting the climate west of the Rocky Mountains. If ever called upon to decide on a climate for a friend or patient who had determined to change from this, I would advise him, or her, to select California.

Do not change too late! going away from home and friends to die among strangers....

Avoid Humbugs.

Do not run to clairvoyants and spiritual humbugs for advice. A clairvoyant physician once said to me,—

“Mr. So-and-so has just called upon me to learn where he shall spend the winter. He thinks he has the consumption, and that I can tell him where he will pass the winter safely. What confounded fools some of these men are, to be sure!” she exclaimed. “Why, I have got that disease myself (not the foolish disease, but consumption), and don’t know what to do to save my own life.”

That lady is living in Boston to-day. The gentleman went to St. Thomas, dying in the hospital in January, amongst strangers, where every dollar he possessed was stolen from him.

Nearly all patent medicines are humbugs. Avoid them. Dr. Dio Lewis says that “the bath-tub is a humbug.” I believe him. While you avoid drowning inside by pouring down drugs, do not exhaust your vitality externally in a bath-tub. The hand-bath is all-sufficient for consumptives.

Cod-liver Oil and Whiskey.

“Take cod-liver oil and die!” has become proverbial. The oil is utterly worthless as a medicine, and the whiskey usually recommended to be taken in connection is decidedly injurious. It is poisonous. I defy one to obtain a pure article of whiskey in this country. If it could by any means be obtained in its purity, it would not cure this disease any more than the nasty oil from fishes’ livers. The oil is often given, not as a medicine, but as an article of nourishment. If the patient so understands it, all right; it will do no harm; but if he thinks that he is taking a remedial agent, he is deceived thereby, and losing the precious time in which he ought to be employing some remedy for his recovery. The statements that cod-liver oil contains iodine, lime, phosphorus, etc., is all bosh. A most reliable druggist of this city, who has sold a ton or two of the oil, told me that “all the iodine or phosphorus that it contains you might put into your eye, and not injure that organ.”

If good, wholesome bread, butter, milk, eggs, and beef, will not give nutriment to the wasting system, cod-liver oil will not, and the patient must die—provided he has trusted to nutriment alone.

I have never known a consumptive patient to recover upon cod-liver oil. I have known them to recover by other treatment, particularly by the use of the phosphates, as “phosphate of lime,” and iron, soda, and other combinations. I have intimated that a patient should be advised by “his physician;” but if that physician is one of the old-fogy style who insists upon cod-liver oil and whiskey as a cure, why, you had better “change horses in crossing a river,” than to perish on an old, worn-out hobby! There are two classes of patients which the doctor has to deal with; one will follow no instructions accurately, the other swallows everything literally.

I remember a story illustrative of the latter. A dyspeptic applied to Dr. C. for treatment. The doctor looked into the case, gave a prescription, telling the patient to take it, and return in a fortnight.

At the designated time he returned, radiant and happy.

“Did you follow my directions?” inquired the physician.

“O, yes, to the letter, doctor; and see—I am well!”

“I have forgotten just what I gave you; let me see the prescription,” said the doctor, delighted at his success.

“I haven’t it. Why, I took it, sir.”

“Took it—the medicine, you mean,” explained the man of pills and powders.“Medicine? No. You gave me no medicine—nothing but a paper, and I took that according to directions. That’s what cured me.”

The clown had swallowed the recipe!

The consumptive requires nourishment. He must derive it from wholesome food,—even fat meats are beneficial,—not from medicines. Let food be one thing, medicine another. I believe that a man would starve upon cod-liver oil. He would not upon bread or beef.

Sit and Lie Straight.

Go into one of our school-houses, and you may there see subjects preparing for consumption. Our illustrations will give the reader a correct idea of our meaning, without any explanation. The sewing-machines, or rather the position which many girls assume while sitting at their work by them from three to twelve hours a day, tend to depression of the lungs, obstruction of circulation, reduction of the vitality, dyspepsia, and sooner or later lead to consumption.

A HEALTHY POSITION.

Let everybody when walking stand erect, with shoulders slightly thrown back rather than inclined towards the chest, then outward, and keep the mouth closed. When sitting, keep the body erect, or lean back slightly, resting the shoulders, rather than the spinal column, against any substance excepting feathers, changing the limbs from time to time to any easy position. If tired, and one can consistently “loll,” recline to one side, resting the cheek upon the hand. If one is very tired, and desires to “rest fast,” sit with the feet and hands crossed or arms folded.

A CONSUMPTIVE POSITION.

If you lie crooked in bed, do it on the side. “To bend up double, man never was made,” says the song. Do not bolster up the head so as to get a square look at your toes, or, being in a feather bed, till you resemble a letter C. Rather use but one light curled-hair pillow. It is cool and healthy. Avoid feather beds and pillows.

“Didn’t your ‘grandma sleep during nearly a hundred years’ on a feather bed?” My quizzer has returned, peeped over my shoulder, and asked this question. Now see me quench him at a swoop.

“Yes, she did; and I think it probable that if she had not she would have been living now. My grandmother’s good habits, free use of muscle, sunshine, and air, more than offset the use of mince pies, and the evil of sleeping on a feather bed in winter.”

I sleep on a hair mattress and pillow the year round. They are the best.

Catarrh and Cold Feet.—How to cure both.

Catarrh is peculiarly a Yankee disease. Now, how does a Yankee differ in his habits from the rest of the world’s people?

Let me tell you wherein he differs. The “five minutes for refreshments” is an illustration. He hurries, he rushes, he’s a talker; and having hurried unnecessarily, and got himself all in a perspiration, he stops to talk with a friend on the street, in a current of air, possibly in a puddle of water, the consequence of which is checked perspiration, a cold, the catarrh. If the circulation to the skin is checked, that excretory organ ceases to throw off the waste and worn-out matter of the system, and the work is thrown upon the mucous membrane, which if failing to perform the unnatural office, the patient goes into a decline. Set this down as reason No. 1 for the catarrh being peculiarly a “Yankee disease.”

Chronic catarrh necessarily must be connected with a bad circulation of the blood, a want of action in the skin, and usually with cold feet. I must take time to explain these causes of a disease which usually leads to the more fatal one—consumption. Now we have cold feet and loss of action in the skin. Result, catarrh, terminating fatal in consumption.

To keep the feet warm is to restore the circulation. Has your doctor failed to do this? I fear he did not understand the connection, or the patient did not follow his instructions. Dip the cold feet into a little cold water! Is that “too homeopathic?”—cold to cure cold! Never mind, do it. It feels cold at first. Well, catch them out, rub them vigorously with a towel, then with the hands, and when quite red, cover them up in bed, or in stockings and boots. Repeat it daily till cured. Wear thick-soled boots and shoes always. Meantime, take a dose of the third dilution of sulphur mornings, or at ten A. M., and the third trituration of calcarea-carbonica at early bedtime.To restore the loss of circulation to the skin, meantime—for they must both be cured together—take a daily hand-bath; that is, with the hand and in a comfortable room, apply a dose of castile or Windsor soap to the skin, half of the person at a time, if the weather is cool,—avoiding a current of air,—then, with cool or cold water, and the hand only, wash rapidly over the surface, following quickly with a dry towel and the dry hand, till warm. Cover the upper extremity, and proceed to wash the other portion of the body in the same manner. I really believe that there are individuals with such peculiar temperaments, or low state of the blood, that they cannot bear cold water. See to it that it is not fear, or habit, which prevents its use, before abandoning a remedy of such curative powers.

Now, there is no other way under heaven whereby man can be saved from catarrh than this which I have here given. If the patient requires further medical treatment, he or she surely requires this, else there is no catarrh in the case.

“But can’t you give me some snuff, doctor?”

Snuffs and nasal injections are humbugs. They will not cure a chronic catarrh. The sugar and gum arabic powder is excellent for the local irritation. That is all any local remedy can reach. Thousands of dollars are expended annually for “Catarrh Remedies,” which never cured a case yet, but have been the death of thousands, by aggravating and prolonging the disease.

Indigestion and “a goneness at the stomach” not unusually accompany the above disease. In addition to the instructions here given, rubbing and slapping the region of the stomach with water and the hand, and taking small quantities of extract gentian, orange-peel, dock, and ginger, equal parts, twice daily, following the directions regarding slow eating and cheerfulness, will eventually remove the distressing disease.

Other Things to be Avoided.

For consumption, the old-fogy treatment by squills, ipecac, laudanum, and the host of expectorants, is worthless. One of the fatalities in this disease has been the sticking to these useless medicines by a certain class of physicians and patients.

Use no tobacco. If tight-lacing and confined habits, as want of air and exercise, have been conducive to the development of consumption in females, more repulsive habits have led to catarrhal affections, destruction of the vitality, and finally to consumption in many of the opposite sex. Does the mother, by habits which injure her health, jeopardize the life and health of her offspring? The husband and father, by the debasing and health-destroying habit of tobacco-using, injures both mother and child. The description which I have given in the article on tobacco, respecting cleansing the young man, and purifying him fit for society, is no joke! The clothes, skin, blood, muscle, and bones,—even the seminal fluid,—of the confirmed tobacco-user, all are impregnated with tobacco poison. Does any one question but something of this virus is transmitted to the offspring? Further, I have known many a wife to become tobacco-diseased,—nervous, yellow, sick at the stomach, dyspeptic, neuralgic, etc.,—suffering untold horrors, from lying, night after night, during year in and year out, beside a great, filthy, tobacco-plant of a husband!

Perhaps some sensitive gentleman—user of the weed of course—may object to my way of putting it. Sound truths, like sound meat, require no mincing. We know that children, sleeping constantly with elderly people, become prematurely old and infirm. We know also that nurses and others, sleeping with perpetual invalids, imbibe their diseases. The skin of the tobacco-user is continually giving off the tobacco poison—nicotine—and the more susceptible skin of the female, or child, by its absorbent powers, is as continually taking in this poison. There are many tobacco-users, who, if they knew this fact, would for this reason, if no other, abandon the injurious and sinful habit; would not want to continue a habit—be it never so slavish—which, aside from its injury to themselves, was destroying the health and lives of his wife and his children.

Tobacco exhausts the saliva, the fluids, the blood, often the muscle, and destroys the recuperative powers of the human system. It weakens the power of the heart. Nine tenths of the reported deaths from “heart disease” really originate, or result directly from the effects of tobacco-using. And, finally, it destroys the good effects of nearly all medicines. I positively affirm that no patient afflicted with a chronic disease can recover by the use of medicines if he continues the excessive use of tobacco.

I think these are good and conclusive reasons why one should not use that pernicious weed—tobacco.

Avoid all excesses, particularly of coition. Consumptives should husband all their resources. One other way of doing this is to keep from wasting the breath and caloric of the system through the mouth. Again, I say, breathe only through the nostrils. Keep out of crowded and unventilated halls, school-rooms, churches, and houses. Air! air and sunshine! don’t forget them.

Avoid patent medicines. They are worthless. Even if one in a thousand were adapted to the disease in question, it might not be to the peculiar constitution of the invalid.

People are so differently constituted that one kind of food, clothing, or medicine cannot be adapted to all. I wish that I could tell every reader of these pages what remedies are adapted to persons suffering from not only consumption, but from a hundred other diseases. But it is impossible, as intimated in the fore part of this chapter. Not only the quality of a medicine suited to one constitution may not be at all suited to another, but the quantity is even as uncertain. It requires much knowledge and long experience in the disease, and its various peculiarities, as also of the varied constitution and idiosyncrasies of different patients, in order to prescribe successfully.

As the majority of the readers of this work are predisposed to consumption, let them seek to prevent its development in their systems. The writer has done this; he has told you in plain terms how it was done, how it still can be; but it is you who must believe in and abide by these instructions. Do this, and you will scarcely require to obtain and retain the knowledge of a thousand remedies and a complete knowledge of yourself, which it requires a lifetime of practice and study to possess.

Dr. Worcester Beach, of New York, in one of his botanical works, tells of a country-woman who, having been given up as incurable with consumption, gathered and boiled together all the different kinds of herbs and barks which she could find upon the farm, and making this decoction into a syrup, drank of it freely, and was cured thereby! I would not recommend this empirical sort of practice, but quote it to show the uncertainty of what medicine was adapted to the case.