Is tuberculosis infectious?
In 1897, Dr. Robert Hunter, an experienced physician in lung diseases with over 50 years of practice and having examined around 50,000 patients, made a parallel observation regarding tuberculosis. He also noted that the experience of over 60 years in the largest lung-disease hospital in the world found no evidence of transmission from the sick to the well. Based on this information, Dr. Hunter firmly and unequivocally stated that tuberculosis was not infectious.
“The great Hospital for Consumption at Brompton, London, in existence for over sixty years, is the largest hospital for lung diseases in the world. It has a large staff of physicians, with scores of nurses and other hospital attendants. If consumption [tuberculosis] was infectious it certainly would show itself among those in such close and constant contact with it, in all its worst and most advanced stages; and yet Dr. Williams, the senior physician, says: ‘Infection in the wards of the hospital between consumptives and non-consumptives is unknown.’...
My own personal experience for more than 50 years of active professional life, the chief part of which has been given to the study and treatment of lung diseases as a specialty – each day being spent in the examination of their chests, analyzing their sputa [saliva mixed with mucus or pus, expectorated from the lungs and respiratory passages], exposed at all times to their breath and to emanations from their bodies, with the expectorations always in my cuspidors [place for spitting] – show conclusively that it is not infectious and cannot be communicated by association. I have never in my fifty years of practice met with an instance of infection, or seen anything to make me believe it could be communicated from the sick to the well.
With the records of over 50,000 cases so examined and treated by me, I am able to speak with all confidence and assured judgment in saying that there is no warrant or foundation for any belief consumption is infectious or communicable in any degree or under any circumstances whatever. The assumption that it can be communicated is disproved by the statistics of consumption in all civilized lands, by the reports of consumption hospitals and all institutions for the treatment of lung diseases, and by the united clinical experience of scientific specialists throughout the civilized worlds who have made lung diseases a life study.
No physician can believe consumption is infectious without discrediting the annals of his own profession, the teachings of its leading authorities, and the overwhelming judgment of the great body of medical practitioners.
In the face of these facts, the setting up of this bogey and fake infection was an outrage and crime against truth, science and humanity...
Consumption is not infectious – It is not communicated from sick to the well. – And it can neither be prevented nor cured by segregation in pest hospitals...”
— Robert Hunter, MD, 1897
Robert Hunter, MD, Consumption Not Contagious, The Canadian Magazine, vol IX., 1897, Ontario Publishing Company, Limited, p. 540.
