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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