But a marked and cheering change has come over our attitude to this wing of the battle of life. So far from regarding it as in any sense necessary to revert to barbarism, still less to savagery, for either the prevention or the cure of disease, we have discovered by the most convincing, practical experience, that we can, in the first place, with the assistance of the locomotive and trolley, combined with modern building skill and sanitary knowledge, put even our city-dwellers under conditions, in both home and workshop, which will render them far less likely to contract tuberculosis than if they were in a peasant's cottage or _the average farmhouse or merchant's house_ of a hundred years ago, to say nothing of the cave, the dugout, or the hut of the savage.
In the second place, instead of simply "going back to nature" and living in brush-shelters on what we can catch or shoot, it takes _all the resources of civilization_ to place our open-air patients in the ideal conditions for their recovery. Let any consumptive be reckless enough to "go back to nature," unencircled by the strong arm of civilized intelligence and power, and unprotected by her sanitary shield, and nature will kill him three times out of five. There could not be a more dangerous delusion than the all-too-common one--that all that is necessary for the cure of consumption is to turn the victim loose among the elements, even in the mildest and most favorable of climates.
He must be fed upon the most abundant and nutritious of foods, even the simplest being milk of a richness which is given by no kind of wild cattle, and which, indeed, only the most carefully bred and highly civilized strains of domestic cattle are capable of producing; eggs such as are laid by no wild bird or by any but the most highly specialized of domestic poultry at the season of the year when they are most required; steaks and chops, hams and sides of bacon, sugar and fruits and nuts, which simply _are not produced anywhere outside of civilization_, and often only in the most intelligent and progressive sections of civilized communities.
Put him upon even the average diet of many people in this progressive and highly civilized United States the year round,--with its thin milk, its pulpy, half-sour butter, its tough meat, its half-rancid pickled pork, its short three months of really fresh vegetables and good fruit, and six months of eternal cabbage, potatoes, dried apples, and prunes,--and he will fail to build up the vigor necessary to fight the disease, even in the purest and best of air.