THE INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON TUBERC ITLOSIS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIE,—In your note in the Spectator of May 27th on the Inter- national Congress on Tuberculosis now being held in Berlin, you comment on the opinion expressed by Dr. Brouardel, the French delegate, that tuberculosis was the most curable of all chronic maladies, and ask,—" What doctor would have ventured to say that twenty years ago ?" Let me tell you. When I was attending clinical lectures at Edinburgh in the early "sixties," one of my preceptors, the late Professor Hughes Bennett, used to teach that tuberculosis was the most curable disease we had knowledge of. In proof of this he quoted his experience as a pathologist, dating back to 1839, to the effect that the spontaneous arrest of tubercle in its early stage occurred in the proportion of one-third to one-half of all the individuals who die after the age of forty ; and the further experience of MM. Rogee and Boudet, gathered at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, which demonstrated that in individuals dying of various diseases, generally above the age of seventy, an arrest of tuberculosis was noticeable in from one-half to four-fifths of the cases. This fact has, therefore, been well recognised by physicians for at least half a century, and daily experience fully confirms it. I may add that Professor Bennett was a great advocate of the open-air treatment of pulmonary consumption, as opposed to the coddling system in vogue in his time, and in one of his works, published forty years ago, he proposed that the Crystal Palace should be adapted as a winter sanatorium for cases of this kind.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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