FOOTNOTES: 

[C] The various tables are chiefly from Blodgett’s Climatology, to which we are otherwise much indebted.

CHAPTER VII.

CONSUMPTION.

Consumption mapped out.—­The east winds.—­Comparative statistics.—­Number of original cases of consumption in Minnesota.—­Consumption can be cured.—­Rev. Jeremiah Day.—­Fresh air the best medicine.—­The benefit of a dry atmosphere.—­Equability of temperature.—­The power of the mind over disease.—­Kinds of consumption.—­Danger in delays.

To all who are afflicted or threatened with pulmonic troubles the climate of Minnesota becomes, in view of its reputed freedom from this scourge, an interesting subject of inquiry.

For a long time it was maintained that this disease was not affected by climate, but that it was the child of other causes, and that its cure was impossible; and dread of its visitation became as great as at the approach of any of the great maladies afflicting mankind.

Later and wiser investigation has proved it to be so much controlled by climate that it may be practically located on a chart of the globe, if all the climatic conditions are fully known.  Of course, it is not absolutely confined to any given limit, more than is the yellow fever, which sometimes makes its appearance as high as the forty-second degree of latitude, while its actual home, so to speak, is, on this continent, below the thirty-fifth parallel.

In a medical chart of this country, which we had occasion to examine many years since, the district where consumption attained its maximum range was outlined along the coast, beginning with the State of Maine, having a semi-circular sweep to Fortress Monroe in Virginia, with an inland limit varying from one to two hundred miles.  This is well known, now, to all the medical profession, to be the territory where phthisis pulmonalis has greatest sweep, and this is conceded to be, for the most part, caused by the marked peculiarities of climate existing over all this area.  These peculiarities have, in some of the immediately preceding chapters, been duly though briefly set forth, and we now proceed to the consideration of the sanitary value of the Minnesota air and its effects on lung diseases as experienced by sufferers and observed by others, together with some of its leading characteristics.

If it has been sufficiently shown that the temperature of the district in which consumption prevails most is a highly variable one, passing almost daily from a low to a high point in the thermometric scale, with the prevailing winds to be those in which east largely enters; and that these winds come laden with a cold moisture, borne from off the surface of the North Atlantic, which, when exposed to their sweep, chill the person and pave the way to colds, catarrhs, rheumatism,