The Congress on Tuberculosis met on Monday in St. James's
Hall, London, and some of the speeches have been of singular interest. For instance, Lord Lister, Dr. Koch, the great master in bacteriology, and Professor Brouardel, Dean of the Faculty in Paris, all agree that consumption is highly infectious, and is diffused first of all by dry sputum. The grand preventives, therefore, must be the reduction of over- crowding, and the segregation of the patients attacked. Dr. Koch, indeed, maintained that the disease might be con- sidered almost entirely one of the lungs, that it was mainly transmitted by inhalation, that too much importance was attached to heredity, which had but little influence, and that the idea of its conveyance from animals to man through milk or otherwise was unfounded. His experiments, in fact, seem to prove that tubercle in man and tubercle in animals are totally different diseases. These conclusions, which would revolutionise the popular theories about consumption, were not accepted by the meeting except as data for further inquiry, Lord Lister's opinion in particular being that while animals certainly could not catch consumption from man, man might catch it from animals.
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