The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1912-04-16

zens., The glowing of the night lights in the buildings in the snow clad mountains at Meriden this past winter would have meant more to him than that there was the New Ha- ven County Sanatorium. It would have meant to him that there more than one hundren human beings, with am- bitions and friends. and capacity for happiness, like in most ways to his own ambitions, his own friends and his own capacity for happiness, were making a brave and bitter fight for life, and that there-thanks to our ptbple's intelligence and love of one him for help, were afforded all the as- sistance that science suggested and money could buy.
 He would have rejoiced over the successful fight that many of these afflicted ones. have made; but she with much searching of soul, that many lof the fights must continue to end in disaster, until we know much more about the disease than we know at present.
 well you are saying, to your selves. ''this is a queer address for a Tuberculosis Commissioner to make to us on this subject. Why doesn't he tell us about the dangers of prbmiscu- ous splitting? About the danger of drinking milk from tuberculous COWS? :? About the danger of the house-hy and mosquito, and the cat and the dog, and the free-lunch fork? About the the unventilated theatre, the unven- tilated school, and the unventilated church ?''
 The very fact that such questions occur to you shows that you do not need to have me discuss them. In oil fn r 71f go into all these subsidiary problems of tuberculosis. Important many of them are, but not so important at this moment as the need that you, leaders of thought and fathers of sanitary legislation in Connecticut, should realize the fact that our present knowledge of tuberculosis is far from being complete. 1t is our duty, of of course. to warn the people of the dangers that threaten them. but our warnings ought to be given without unnecessary shouting. It is not de- sirable to cause panic. A panic can do more damage than the danger the consumptive that has taken pos- session of part of the public during these last years would be Imaginable if it did not have such serious results in the way Of interfering with the erection of hospitals and sanatoria in
 
 increasing the anguish of the patients themselves. One great good that the members of this organization could accomplish in the next year would be the spreading through the state knowledge of the facts that the care full tuberculous patient is about the least dangerous member of the com munity, that a tuberculosis sanator- ium is about the safest place in the county to visit, and that. in spite of the close daily intercourse between the members of the staff and the pa- case of consumption was ever known to be caught by an attending physi- clan or nurse.
 To solve The Tuberculosis Problem, therefore, we need more knowledge of the disease. This knowledge can be acquired by the conjoined investiga- tions of workers in the laboratories and workers in the field. And of these the investigations of the workers in the field are now the most important; and the workers in the field are they who know the sick and desire to help then-doctors and nurses. priests and parsons manufacturers and labor leaders, insurance men and settle ment workers, directors of hospitals and sanatOria, and all others, who, besides position and capacity, have love Of their neighbor.
 It won't do 10 reel that we can leave this matter of searching for the truth about tuberculosis, and the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, to the people or government of some other state sor some other na- tion. There is no good reason why Connecticut should not have the glory of finally solving The Tuberculosis Problem. Why not Connecticut, in- stead Of Prussia or Illinois? Why not Connecticut instead of Massachusetts