Note 6 — Chapter VII · THE MARCH OF SCIENCE

I might have “boggled” (to use one of Mr Andrew Lang’s stately colloquialisms) before this suggestion, but for a remark by Dr C. W. Saleeby, which may here be quoted, to keep me in countenance. “Malaria,” he writes in Nova Medica, Nov. 1904, “which causes more illness than any other disease, is already obsolescent. Tuberculosis, which causes more deaths than any other disease, can be disposed of, apparently, whenever the human race, now mightily smitten with internecine strife, decides that this campaign against a common foe is worth while. It takes some seconds to realise—or begin to realise—what the extinction of tuberculosis will signify in private and hospital practice. Yet the extermination of the last tubercle bacillus is an event quite certainly hidden in the womb of time—time pregnant by science.” ↑