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United States Infantry Tactics, for the Instruction, Exercise, and Manoeuvres of the United States Infantry; including Infantry of the Line, Light Infantry, and Riflemen. Prepared under the Direction of the War Department, and authorized and adopted by the Secretary of War, May 1, 1861. Containing the School of the Soldier, the School of the Company, Instruction for Skirmishers, the General Calls, the Calls for Skirmishers, and the School of the Battalion; including the Articles of War and a Dictionary of Military Terms. With Questions adapted to the Text. By Lieutenant-Colonel H. B. Wilson. Philadelphia. J. B. Lippincott & Co. 18mo. pp. 548. $1.50.

The Origin and History of the English Language, and of the Early Literature it embodies. By George P. Marsh, Author of "Lectures on the English Language," etc., New York. C. Scribner. 8vo. pp. $3.00.

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The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, and Lord High Chancellor of England. Collected and edited by James Spedding, M. A., of Trinity College, Cambridge; Robert Leslie Ellis, M. A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; and Douglas Denon Heath, Barrister-at-Law, late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Vol. V. Boston. Taggard & Thompson. 12mo. pp. 456. $1.50.

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The History of the Civil War in America; comprising a Full and Impartial Account of the Origin and Progress of the Rebellion, of the Various Naval and Military Engagements, of the Heroic Deeds performed by Armies and Individuals, and of Touching Scenes in the Field, the Camp, the Hospital, and the Cabin. By John S. C. Abbott, Author of "Life of Napoleon," " History of the French Revolution," etc. Illustrated with Maps, Diagrams, and Numerous Steel Engravings of Battle-Scenes, from Original Designs by Darley and other Eminent Artists, and Portraits of Distinguished Men. Vol. I. New York. Ledyard Bill. 8vo. pp. 507. $3.00.

The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers. Second Series. New York. G. W. Carleton. 12mo. pp. 367. $1.25.

Sketches of the War: A Series of Letters to the North Moore Street School of New York. By Charles C. Nott. New York. Charles T. Evans. 16mo. pp. 174. 75 cts.

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Garret Van Horn: or, The Beggar on Horseback. By John S. Sauzade. New York. G. W. Carleton. 12mo. pp. 376. $1.25.

Notes, Criticisms, and Correspondence upon Shakspeare's Plays and Actors. By James Henry Hackett. New York. G. W. Carleton. 12mo. pp. 353. $1.50.

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The Pioneer Boy, and how He became President. By William M. Thayer, Author of "The Bobbin Boy," etc. Boston. Walker, Wise, & Co. 16mo. pp. 310. $1.00.

The Last Times and the Great Consummation. An Earnest Discussion of Momentous Themes. By Joseph A. Seiss, D. D., Author of "The Day of the Lord," etc. Philadelphia. Smith, English, & Co. 12mo. pp. 438. $1.25.

The Great Consummation. The Millennial Rest; or, The World as it will be. By the Rev. John Cumming, D. D., F. R. S. E. First Series. New York. G. W. Carleton. 12mo. pp. 307. $1.00.

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XI.-JUNE, 1863.-NO. LXVIII.

WEAK LUNGS, AND HOW TO MAKE THEM STRONG.

THE highest medical authorities of this century have expressed the opinion that tubercular disease of the various tissues is justly chargeable with one-third of the deaths among the youth and adults of the civilized world. The seat of this tubercular disease is, in great part, in the lungs.

Before the taint is localized, it is comparatively easy to remove it. If in regard to most other maladies it may be said that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," in reference to tubercular consumption it may be truly declared that an ounce of prevention is worth tons of cure.

Had the talent and time which have been given to the treatment of consumption been bestowed upon its causes and prevention, the percentage of mortality from this dreaded disease would have been greatly reduced.

NATURE OF CONSUMPTION.

GENUINE Consumption does not originate in a cold, an inflammation, or a hemorrhage, but in tubercles. And these

tubercles are only secondary causes. The primary cause is a certain morbid condition of the organism, known as the tubercular or scrofulous diathesis. This morbid condition of the general system is sometimes hereditary, but much more frequently the result of unphysiological habits. Those cases to which our own errors give rise may be prevented, and a large proportion of those who have inherited consumptive taint may by wise hygiene be saved.

Consumption is not a Local Disease.It is thought to be a malady of the lungs. This notion has led to most of the mistakes in its treatment.

Salt rheum appears on the hand. Some ignorant physician says, "It is a disease of the skin." An ointment is applied; the eruption disappears. Soon, perchance, the same scrofulous taint appears in the lungs in the form of tubercles. The doctor cannot get at it there with his ointment, and resorts to inhalation. He is still determined to apply his drug to the local manifestation.

Salt rheum is not a disease of the skin. It is a disease of the system, showing it

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

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self at the skin. Consumption is not a disease of the lungs. It is a disease of the system, showing itself in the lungs.

A ship's crew is seized with some fearful malady. They hang out a flag of distress. Another ship passes near the infected vessel. Its captain discovers the flag of distress. A boat's crew is sent to cut it down. The captain turns to his passengers with the triumphant exclamation, “We have saved them! All signs of distress have disappeared!"

A human body is diseased in every part. A flag of distress is hung out in the form of some malady at the surface. Some physician whose thinking is on the surface of things applies an ointment, which compels the malady to go back within the body again. Then he cries, "I have cured him; see, it is all gone!"

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In 1847, two brothers, bank-officers, afflicted with chronic inflammation of the eyes, came under my care. I repeatedly prescribed for them, but their eyes got no better. Indeed, they had little hope of relief; for, during their years of suffering, many physicians had treated them without avail. At length I told them there was no hope but in absence from their business, and such recreation as would elevate the general tone. A few months of hunting, fishing, and enjoyment in the country sufficed to remove the redness and weakness from their eyes. As I have argued, the disease was not one of the eyes, but of the entire system, which had assumed a local expression.

This dependence of particular upon general disease is a common idea with the people. A young man begins businoss with a large capital. He falls into

dissipation. In ten years it exhausts his fortune. When at last we see him begging for bread, we do not say this exhibition of his poverty is his financial disease. His financial constitution has been ruined. The begging is only an unpleasant exhibition of that ruin. During this course of dissipation, the young man, in addition to the exhaustion of his fortune, ruins his health. His lungs fall into consumption. Some doctor may tell you it is disease of the lungs. But it is no more disease of the lungs than was begging the man's financial malady. In either case, the apparent disease is only an exhibition of the constitutional malady.

In brief, a local disease is an impossibility. Every disease must be systemic before it can assume any local expression. Or, in other words, every local pathological manifestation is an expression of systemic pathological conditions.

Now what is the practical value of this argument? I reply: So long as people believe bronchitis to be a disease of the throat, or consumption a disease of the lungs, so long will they labor under the hallucination that a cure is to be found in applications to these parts. But when they are convinced that these discases are local expressions of morbid conditions pervading the whole organism, then whatever will invigorate their general health, as Nature's hygienic agents, will receive their constant and earnest attention.

CAUSES OF CONSUMPTION.

SIR JAMES CLARKE says, "It may be fairly questioned whether the proportion of cures of confirmed consumption is greater at the present day than in the time of Hippocrates: and although the public may continue to be the dupes of boasting charlatans, I am persuaded that no essential progress has been made or can be made in the cure of consumption, until the disease has been treated upon different principles from what it hitherto has been. If the labor and ingenuity which have been misapplied in fruitless

efforts to cure an irremediable condition of the lungs had been rightly directed to the investigation of the causes and nature of tuberculous disease, the subject of our inquiry would have been regarded in a very different light from that in which it is at the present period."

While I shall not attempt a discussion of all the causes of phthisis pulmonalis, I shall, in a brief and familiar way, consider the more obvious sources of this terrible malady, and particularly those which all classes may remove or avoid.

Impure Air a Cause of Consumption. -In discussing the causes of a disease whose principal expression is in the lungs, nothing can be more legitimate than a consideration of the air we breathe. full respiration, it penetrates every one of the many millions of air-cells.

In

Dust.-Every species of dust must prove injurious. Workers in those factories where tools are ground and polished soon die of pulmonary disease. The dust of cotton and woollen factories, that of the street, and that which is constantly rising from our carpets, are all mischievous. M. Benoiston found among cotton-spinners the annual mortality from consumption to be 18 in a thousand; among coal-men, 41; among those breathing an atmosphere charged with mineral dust, 30, and with dust from animal matter, as hair, wool, bristles, feathers, 54 per thousand of these last the greatest mortality was among workers in feathers; least among workers in wool. The average liability to consumption among persons breathing the kinds of dust named was 24 per thousand, or 2.40 per cent. In a community where many flints were made, there was great mortality from consumption, the average length of life being only 19 years.

Gases. Among the poisonous gases which infest our atmosphere, carbonic acid deserves special consideration. The principal result of all respiration and combustion, it exists in minute quantities everywhere, but when it accumulates to the extent of one or two per cent. it seriously compromises health. I have

seen the last half of an eloquent sermon entirely lost upon the congregation; carbonic acid had so accumulated that it operated like a moderate dose of opium. No peroration would arouse them. Nothing but open windows could start life's currents. In lectures before lyceums, I often have a quarrel with the managers about ventilation. There is, even among the more intelligent, a strange indifference to the subject.

The following fact graphically illustrates the influence of carbonic acid on human life.

A young Frenchman, M. Deal, finding his hopes of cutting a figure in the world rather dubious, resolved to commit suicide; but that he might not leave the world without producing a sensation and flourishing in the newspapers, he resolved to kill himself with carbonic acid. So, shutting himself up in a close room, he succeeded in his purpose, leaving to the world the following account, which was found near his dead body the next morning.

"I have thought it useful, in the interest of science, to make known the effects of charcoal upon man. I place a lamp, a candle, and a watch on my table, and commence the ceremony.

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It is a quarter past ten. I have just lighted the stove; the charcoal burns feebly.

"Twenty minutes past ten. The pulse is calm, and beats at its usual rate.

"Thirty minutes past ten. A thick vapor gradually fills the room; the candle is nearly extinguished; I begin to feel a violent headache; my eyes fill with tears; I feel a general sense of discomfort; the pulse is agitated.

"Forty minutes past ten. My candle has gone out; the lamp still burns; the veins at my temple throb as if they would burst; I feel very sleepy; I suffer horribly in the stomach; my pulse is at eighty.

"Fifty minutes past ten. I am almost stifled; strange ideas assail me. . . . . I can scarcely breathe. . . . . I shall not ... There are symptoms of

go far. madness.

...

...

"Eleven o'clock. I can scarcely write.

....

. . . My sight is troubled. . . . . My lamp is going out. . . . . I did not think it would be such agony to die. Ten . . . .

Here followed some quite illegible characters. Life had ebbed. The following morning he was found on the floor.

The steamer Londonderry left Liverpool for Sligo, on Friday, December 2d, 1848, with two hundred passengers, mostly emigrants. A storm soon came on. The captain ordered the passengers into the steerage cabin, which was eighteen feet long, eleven wide, and seven high. The hatches were closed, and a tarpaulin fastened over this only entrance to the cabin.

The poor creatures were now condemned to breathe the same air over and over again. Then followed a dreadful scene. The groans of the dying, the curses and shrieks of those not yet in the agonies of death, must have been inconceivably horrible. The struggling mass at length burst open the hatches, and the mate was called to gaze at the fearful spectacle. Seventy-two were already dead, many were dying, their bodies convulsed, the blood starting from their nostrils, eyes, and ears.

It does not appear that the captain designed to suffocate his passengers, but that he was simply ignorant of the fact that air which has passed to and fro in the lungs becomes a deadly poison.

The victims of the Black Hole in Calcutta and of the Steamer Londonderry, with the thousand other instances in which immediate death has resulted from carbonic acid, are terrible examples in the history of human suffering; but these cases are all as nothing, compared with those of the millions who nightly sleep in unventilated rooms, from which they escape with life, but not without serious injury. As a medical man, I have visited thousands of sick persons, and have not found one hundred of them in a pure atmosphere. I have often returned from church seriously doubting whether I had not committed a sin in exposing myself to its poi

sonous air. There are in our great cities churches costing fifty thousand dollars, in the construction of which not fifty dollars were expended in providing means for ventilation. Ten thousand dollars for ornament, but not ten dollars for pure air! Parlors with furnace-heat and a number of gas-burners (each of which consumes as much oxygen as several men) are made as close as possible, and a party of ladies and gentlemen spend half the night in them. In 1861 I visited a legislative hall. The legislature was in session. I remained half an hour in the most impure air I ever attempted to breathe. If the laws which emanated from such an atmosphere were good, it is a remarkable instance of the mental and moral rising above a depraved physical. Our school-houses are, some of them, so vile in this respect that I would prefer to have my son remain in utter ignorance of books, rather than breathe, during six hours of every day, so poisonous an atmosphere. Theatres and concertrooms are so foul that only reckless people can continue to visit them. Twelve hours in a railway-car exhausts one, not because of the sitting, but because of the devitalized air. While crossing the ocean in the Cunard steamer Africa, and again in the Collins steamer Baltic, I was constantly amazed that men who knew enough to construct such noble ships did not know enough to furnish air to the passengers. The distresses of sea-sickness are greatly intensified by the sickening atmosphere which pervades the ship. Were carbonic acid black, what a contrast would be presented between the air of our hotels and their elaborate ornamentation!

It is hardly necessary to say that every place I have mentioned might be cheaply and completely ventilated.

Consumption originates in the tubercular diathesis. This diathesis is produced by those agencies which deprave the blood and waste vitality. Of these agencies none is so universal and potent as impure air. When we consider, that, besides mingling momentarily with the

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