Arizona republican., 1905-05-27

while the prospects of a cure are just as good. the patient on his return home is not deprived of the additional stim- ulus to which one living in the high attitudes has become accustomed. Phoenix, the center of the Salt River district in Arizona, has become the rallying point of these health seekers.
 The conditions are not what heed less physicians and relatives think when they send patients to Phoenix alone and with scant means of sup port. The sick man is told that all he needs is to get to that country and that there he will be able to sup port himself by light and healthful work. But what the incapacited one finds on his arrival is a country al- ready overcrowded with people looking for similar opportunities, and that competition has forced down prices un- til 1t iF difficult to earn even a mere pittance. The country is essentially a ranching one, where the rough farm | ing and herding work requires pre- vious training and a healthy body to support it's hardships. Board and lodging are even higher on ranches, and the food is rarely of the expen- sive kind necessary for tuberculosis patients. Friendless and alone, the despairing patient sees his small re- serve fund rapidly consumed, ana soon becomes dependent on the charity of strangers in a community tEat has no interest in him, and where he finds on many sides an almost hardened fndif- ference to his pitiable need. This is not because residents of Phoenix are lacking in the finer feelings which prompt to charitable service, put be- cause the people of the east and mid q 61n rcc.t hx~ 4T,aSr- o.1Iy
 thought, putting upon them a burden which in no sense belongs to them. The supervisors say the poor in the almshouse cost the county $20,000 a year, and three-q quarters of this is spent in the care of ailing consump- tives, while the resources of the local lodges, the church, and the one free sanitarium are strained to the utter. most.
 The duty devolves upon every phy- sician considering the question of send ing a consumptive away from home, to determine first wheth- CT the lesion is still slight enough to offer reasonable pros poets of a cure, and secondly, whether the patients finances are such as to enable him to secure the comforts his illness requires and which his pro- tracted isolation from home and friends makes doubly needful Such progress is being made in the home treatment of tuberculosis by careful management and attention to details that ones assumes a certain responsi- bility in sending an invalid into a strange country where there is more than a possibility that he will be eX- posed to all the horrors of sicvness and want in a community so over burdened with similar appeals as to make adequate assistance impossible.
 Tuberculosis selects it's victims in discriminatory It takes toll of all classes, but a large portion of it's vic tims come from the wage earning class, and the serious problem is the lack of means needed to secure the special treatment. American Medi- cine suggests this:
 It is natural that sanitarfum treat ment should at first copy the methods of expensive institutions in which the indoor treatment of any disease was the chief. Hence has arisen an alto- gather too expensive an ideal. Of all things in the world, open afr is the cheapest. Do not let us make it eX- pensive by too great insistence upon the adventitious adjuncts of the treat ment of tuberculosis. Of course, nec- essaries are to be put into the count. EoOlIlC NdTIlllit eIlC SOOQ lOOu OI the right kinds are needed. but ex- pensive plants" are not needed. The chief requisite and one too little con sidered in historic and in modern times, is the personal clothing. A pro- lessor of clothing is needed in every medical college. The sanitarium offi- cers should give much greater atten- tion to this matter, and when they