Mental treatment is most valuable in the very early stage of incipient cases of tuberculosis. The time is past when the diagnosis of tuberculosis was made only after the recognition of definite physical signs in the lungs and a considerable loss in weight.

In the Medical News for April 9, 1904, I called attention to the question of "Early Diagnosis of Tuberculosis" from the pulse and the temperature in these cases, and pointed out that a disturbance of temperature need not necessarily be a febrile temperature of over 100 degrees, but that any increase of the normal daily variation of temperature, usually considered to be about a degree and a half, should suffice to arouse serious suspicion at least. If the morning and evening temperatures differ by two degrees, this would indicate the presence of some pathological condition, usually tuberculosis. If in addition to this and the pulse disturbance there is any localized area of prolongation of {355} expiration, then tuberculosis is almost certainly present, even though there may be no other physical signs, no cough, no tubercle bacilli in the sputum, nor any other signs of an active process.

It is in these cases particularly that patients can be benefited. Very often they have a slight hacking cough, frequently repeated, with some disturbance of appetite and of digestion and sometimes some loss in weight. Indigestion is recognized now as one of the early stages of tuberculosis. The cough in these cases, as has been said, is often spoken of as a stomach cough and is supposed to be due to the nervous reflex from the pneumogastric nerve carrying irritative impulses from the stomach to the lungs. It is much more likely to be due directly to irritation of the terminal filaments of this same nerve in the lungs themselves.