Walks and Talks - Alleged Cures for Consumption

A determined protest should be entered by the medical profession of this country against alleged cures for consumption that are heralded from time to time. Hardly a month passes in which we escape hearing some new and illusory hope, held out to the most unfortunate sufferers in the community. It is of the unfortunates who are already attacked and who are hoping against hope for cure that my voice is raised.

A stricken friend once said to me with tears in his eyes: "It's too bad that I must die with this disease, because the doctors will be curing it five years hence." That was ten years ago, and science couldn't save him to-day.

What answer could be made to so pathetic a remark? To tell the invalid that his case was incurable would have been cruelty. To agree with him that science would be able to save unfortunates who came after him would not mitigate the despair in his heart.

The papers of this morning contain an announcement that the bacilli of consumption can be destroyed in the human system by the application of one million volts of electricity. Every reader will sincerely hope that this quantity of the electric fluid can be passed through the human frame with safety. Nikola Tesla declares that he has taken it in that amount and lives to tell about it, and yet some of us who have stood in the death chamber at Sing Sing know that 1,800 to 2,700 volts will kill. The best physicians admit that the much heralded toxine of Dr. Koch, the German savant, is a failure up to date. Dr. Koch's theory is a good one and is founded upon correct lines, it is conceded, but results do not justify the hopes so confidently expressed in the past.

If so able a practitioner has failed, what is to be expected of experimentalists who offer nostrums to the afflicted for the sake of getting rich quickly. Somebody ought to interfere. Why not the general government? It assumes authority to stop abuses of the mail: if it controlled the express business the distribution of quack medicines that are now barred from the post office could be checked.