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APPENDIX F

 

THE TREATMENT OF TUBERCULOSIS IN

SANATORIA*

 

                                                              May 18, 1911.

 

SIR,

             Mr. Balfour’s remarks last night in the House of Commons on the proposed grant towards sanatoria for the treatment of tuberculosis do not sound as though they would help much in the crusade against consumption. Grants in aid of research here are not now needed, since the origin and nature of tuberculosis are established. So far as it goes, the open-air treatment in sanatoria is natural and rational; fundamentally, it is an attempt to improve the patient’s metabolism, and to introduce normal ferments into his blood in a natural manner. Less than a month ago I received a long letter from one who has devoted some forty years of his life to the study of the digestive ferments, in which he says that it looks to him, from a survey of recent American and German medical literature, as though trypsin, the chief ferment of the pancreas gland or sweetbread, were “going to be of great benefit in tuberculosis.” To those possessed of scientific acumen and imagination this is quite clear, but the phrase must be extended to include the ferment amylopsin, which is the complement of trypsin. On true scientific grounds, not in non-existent ones of “medical science,” Dr. H. Edwin Lewis, of Burlington, Vt., U.S.A., first used hypodermic injections of trypsin in

* The Scotsman, May 20, 1911.

 

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