Should it over transpire that some means of prevention should be found, by means of which people would be rendered proof against the disease, or at least could be cured when once it had set its seal upon them, would it not be one of the greatest boons vouchsafed to man since the introduction of vaccination?
Inventive persons have from time to time thought that they had secured a sure cure, if not an unfailing prophylactic; and, at the present time, since the discoveries of Koch, all sorts of parasiticides are being used to kill the germ of the disease. The unfortunate bacillus is now being hunted down with pneumatic chambers, deep inhalations, and local applications introduced by means of the hypodermic syringe, with results that are, to say the least, uncertain.
But, after all the years of research devoted to the subject, and out of all the methods of prevention and cure that have been suggested, the one that has given the best results, and is now being universally adopted, is change of climate.
Says Professor Frankland, in an article on the "Yellowstone Park as a Winter Resort," which was published in a recent number of "The Popular Science Monthly," "The great importance of a winter sanitarium for patients suffering from or threatened with consumption and other allied diseases has long been recognized and acted upon in Europe."
Such patients have been hurried off to Mentone and the Riviera, or sent across the Mediterranean into Northern Africa, or they have been told to take a trip up the Nile, and, more recently, they have been congregated at Davos in the Engadine.
If it be true that, on the other side of the waters, they have recognized the importance of a change of climate for the cure of consumption, it is also true that the public and medical profession alike, in our own country, are also awakening to a due sense of its efficacy.
We have our Florida, South Carolina, and Cumberland Mountains, the Adirondacks, Southern California, Minnesota, and Colorado, and New Mexico, where patients are sent indiscriminately, each one of which places has its coterie of especial admirers, and over the respective merits of which a great deal of verbal warfare has been waged.
It is not the intention of the writer to enter upon any arguments with so-called climatologists as to what are the specific elements of a climate adapted to consumptives, nor to give a detailed comparison of the several resorts. Each place can undoubtedly give its instances of remarkable cures, as can also Cape Cod and certain portions of New Jersey; and some rare and isolated cases could also be cited where complete recovery has resulted even in the large cities; but the point is, to determine just where and under what conditions we may invariably look for the best results.
To be able to speak ex cathedra on such a matter would require an
- July, 1885.