Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/364

Tuberculosis Camp

on the reservation. No unimportant function of the sanatorium is that which finds its result in the influence of the education in hygiene and tuberculosis prevention, upon those who leave after having been cured or benefited by the treatment. These men spread their new-found knowledge among their associates and so extend the actual good accomplished.

Patients come to Fort Stanton largely from sailor boarding houses and other crowded districts of the large sea ports. Some are old incurable cases, but their lives are prolonged and made more comfortable, and incidentally the Sanatorium is in effect a quarantine station, not in restraining men from liberty, but in that it keeps from the large centers of population a daily average of over two hundred consumptives who in all probability would have continued as sources of infection to innumerable others.

Over half the cases admitted have been returned to active life either cured or near enough cured to resume their occupations.

Outside of Fort Stanton, the larger marine hospitals are located in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Detroit, Buffalo and New Orleans.

The second-class stations are under the command of commissioned officers, but have no hospital accommodations of their own. Patients are kept in private or other hospitals, under the exclusive professional care of the medical officer, and the government pays for the hospital facilities under a definite contract. Third-class stations are under the charge of contract acting assistant surgeons, and patients are cared for under government contract with local hospitals. All other relief stations come under the fourth class. Certain of these have a contract surgeon in charge, but have no hospital facilities available, and the