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Show TB Remains Big Puzzle Medical Science Knows Little About Malady MILWAUKEE. Despite the fact that everyone has, has had or will have a little tuberculosis, medical men know almost nothing about it. It is the most important single cause of death in the 15 to 35 year age group. Some 40,000 United States citizens citi-zens will die of it next year. Fewer die of it today than 100 years ago. It is caused by a germ. That is about the sum total of our sure knowledge of tuberculosis. One hundred years ago the white death annually claimed some 300 victims per 100,000 of population. Today the figure has dropped to 30 per 100,000. Why? Science does not know. Many hygienists claim that a growing awareness of the necessity for pure air, pure food, pure water and less promiscuous spitting accounts for the decline. Others think the chief factor was a steady increase in the abundance and variety of foodstuffs, resulting in better nourishment of the population. pop-ulation. Still others believe the major factor fac-tor was genetic; the human strains most susceptible to' tuberculosis were almost wiped out by the great scourage of the 19th century when the white death came to such celebrities celeb-rities as Schiller, Keats, Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Chopin, Paga-nini, Paga-nini, Balzac, Thoreau, Kmerson, Rhodes, Stevenson and many others, oth-ers, famous and infamous alike. Many died too young to leave children. chil-dren. Hence, the present human stock has greater natural resistance. resist-ance. All these reasons sound plausible. plausi-ble. , But they stand at best as guesses. Twenty-three centuries ago the world's first great physician, Hippocrates, Hip-pocrates, described the symptoms and course of the disease with marvelous mar-velous accuracy, noting that it appeared ap-peared to be hereditary and was more common among individuals ol a certain physical type and those living in certain places. But not until Mar. 24, 1882, wher the brilliant Robert Koch presentee a paper before the Physiologica! Society of Berlin, did men knov, that the disease arose from the in vasion of specific germs. |
