9. Alcoholic Drinks - The Causes of Consumption or Tuberculosis

Dr. Richardson has recently shown that the use of alcohol not only predisposes an individual to consumption but that it entails upon him liability to a peculiar form of the disease which is the direct result of alcoholic poisoning. This is particularly true of persons who use liquors to an immoderate degree, but it is also true of moderate drinkers as well. The facts demonstrated by Dr. Richardson furnish an unanswerable objection to the employment of alcoholic drinks as a preventive of consumption, for which it has been so highly recommended by many physicians. It also clearly interdicts its use as a curative remedy.

10. Tobacco - The Causes of Consumption or Tuberculosis

It is well known that the use of tobacco is exceedingly productive of catarrh of the nose and throat, which fact alone is sufficient to condemn its use, if it were impossible to show that its deleterious effects upon the respiratory organs extended no farther than the organs mentioned, since it is well known that catarrh of the throat very frequently extends by slow degrees into the larger and then to the smaller bronchial tubes, finally sotting in operation the degenerating changes and processes which result in the destruction of the lungs.

11. Depressing Mental Influences - The Causes of Consumption or Tuberculosis

Long-continued grief, fear anxiety, disappointment, together with other depressing mental influences, often result in the production of conditions of the system which render the individual thus suffering open to the inroads of pulmonary disease. The recognition of this fact ought to lead every individual who is from any cause so situated as to be subject to depress ing influence to contend strongly against such influence rather than to give way to their emotions and allow themselves to become the prey of circumstances. Causes of this kind can be contended against as successfully as those of any other sort. The depression arising from too dose confinement to mental labor, especially when it is of a very taxing or onerous character, operates in the same way as depressing influences of any other sort.

12. Heredity - The Causes of Consumption or Tuberculosis

It is very rare that the disease itself is inherited. The unfortunate inheritance is simply a tendency to the disease, or a susceptibility of constitution which increases an individuals liability to the affection. There is no doubt that it is entirely possible for the individual whose family is consumptive in a marked degree, and whose inherited' tendency is unmistakable, to so regulate his course of life as to overcome the tendency, at least in a very large degree, and to so fortify his constitution against this malady as to prolong his life to the natural limit of human longevity.

13. Prolonged Nursing - The Causes of Consumption or Tuberculosis

Is another cause of pulmonary disease to which attention should be called. Many mothers have survived the risks and sufferings of child-birth only to die victim to the long-continued drain upon their system arising from prolonging the period of lactation beyond its natural limit. Healthy mothers with robust constitutions may do this with impunity; but a weakly woman who has given birth to several children in rapid succession, and whose constitution has been materially weakened by the excessive demands upon her sexual and nutritive forces, even perils her own life by the maintenance of that of her child. We do not wish to give any countenance to the evil practice becoming so common, especially in large cities, of employing wet nurses for the simple purpose of relieving mothers of the inconvenience of nursing and caring for their own off-spring, when they are well able and qualified by nature to do so; but it often becomes the duty of the observing physician to urge upon a weakly mother the discontinuance of nursing as the only means of safety to her own life and possibly also of her child, to whom the insidious pulmonary disease might be imparted through the medium of mother's milk.