Jasper County Democrat, Volume 12, Number 69, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 December 1909 — ABOUT CONSUMPTION. [ARTICLE]

ABOUT CONSUMPTION.

Consumption is a poor man’s disease., It is induced by too much breathing of bad air In tightly closed bedrooms and unventilated shops. Insufficient and poorly cooked food is also an inducing cause. The consumption microbe cannot get into the body until we have treated the body to bad air and bad food for a lonp time. About three poor persons die of consumption to one rich or well-to-do person. The poor can have as much pure air as the rich and they can learn, if they will, how to cook and properly prepare plain food. Consumption is curable in its early stages, but if the patient puts off looking after himself and tries to believe he hasn’t the disease when the doctor says he has, then the poor fellow must die. It costs on an average about $250 to cure an incipient consumptive or to care for an advanced case until death. If the two-hundred and fifty dollars are spent for cure, a life is saved and the state made richer and better. If spent for cure after it is too late to cure, the money is largely lost and the citizen too. A stitch in time save nine. Let us act with forethought and save our money and strength- Almost 5,000 people die annually in Indiana from consumption and it would be an easy matter to prevent 4,000 of these deaths. Let us prevent. t There is money, strength and happiness in it. How shall we prevent? you ask. Make open and strong protest against unventilated schoolhouses, unventilated bedrooms, unventilated store rooms, unventilated trolly and steam cars, unventilated churches, unventilr.ted courtrooms, unventilated printing-offices and rooms. Every person who has consumption or pneumonia has breathed too much foul air. If you do not acquire one of these diseases after much breathing of foul air, you have escaped, that is all. Such fact does not prove foul air to be wholesome.

You have not yet been killed by arsenic or a bullet, yet you favor doing what is sensible to restrict these agencies of death. Would it not be reasonable and good business to control other agencies of death? After you have attended to the pure air matter then eat only plain, wellcooked food, chewing it well. Fancy cooking and rich dishes and bolting of food with gulps of liquid, help to lower the disease resistance of the body. Disease don't get in until you lower your resistance by violating some of the laws of your well-being and happiness. Keep stimulants out of your body. They always do harm. Don't take drugs except under the advice of a physician. “He who doctors himself has a fool for a physician-” To live long and preserve all your faculties to the last, is a duty. A Japanese merchant traveling in the United States said “Why do you have so many doctors, so many drugstores, so much medicine, so many hospitals?” Do they not testify to the fact that you do not live according to the laws of health? Where is the man who does not believe in the old adage: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure*'? Yet, where is the man who puts this belief into constant practical effect? What is the use of knowledge if we don’t live by it? Let us all study the laws of health, the laws of our well-being and when the laws are learned, let us apply them practically to everyday life. Robert Louis Stevenson was dying of consumption, although warned against the disease in time. When near his death day he wrote: “Now take warning by me. I am set up by a beneficent Providence at the corner of the road to warn you to flee from the habitude to come. So remember to keep well; and remember—anything anything, than not to keep well; and I say again anything rathpr than not to keep remember—anything, anything, than well.”—J. N. Hurty, State Health Commissioner.