The Cause of Consumption.
By D. H. Kress, M.D.
WOMEN constrict their waists either with corsets or bands, making it impossible to take in more than one half of the air needed to keep the blood clean and the system freed from impurities. Men confine themselves to the city office and forget how nature designed them to breathe, the lungs never being fully inflated. Both men and women sleep in rooms from which pure air is carefully excluded, and then we wonder why man is born to sorrow! Consumption, "the Great White Plague" of modern times, is carrying off thousands of our young men and women each year in the United States. There is a cause for this. A noted doctor has said, "Only those who are too lazy to breathe have consumption." Certainly persons who make full use of their lungs seldom have this disease, and those who have the disease and begin to breathe as they should, frequently recover. It is the upper lobes of the lungs, the parts which are not usually filled with air by ordinary house-, school-, or office-breathers, which lose their vitality, and in which the germ of tuberculosis finds an inviting nook for development.