190 FLORIDA.

sufferers from these diseases who have made the experi-
ment, and we regret to say the want of moral courage (to
which the writer pleads personally guilty) in facing and
presenting the inevitable to our patients, respectable pro-
fessional and popular doubts as to the efficiency of the cli-
mate of Florida as a remedy for consumption have arisen;
yet the drift of the sentiment of both classes, within the
scope of his observation, is more marked at the present hour
in favor of the idea that nowhere else in this country is to
be found the same reliable evidence as to the value of cli-
mate-cure in disease, and specially in consumption, as that
which has been accumulating for many years in regard to
the State of Florida. That there is a decided exemption
from tubercular consumption, as originating in Georgia and
other Southern States in the same latitude, as compared with
the northern sections of the United States, and that many
persons in the incipient stage of the disease, or with a pro-
clivity in that direction, in the North, have been greatly
benefited by a removal to the milder and more genial cli-
mate of almost every portion of the Southern States, and
especially in Georgia and the Carolinas, is doubtless true ;
but that this advantage has been mainly due in this region
to the greater opportunity for exercising in comfort and
safety in the open air, and to the escape from the noxious
influences of a long winter residence in close and heated
rooms, rather than to any specific curative influence of the
climate, there is no doubt.
 That thousands and tens of thousands of delicate people
with an inherited or acquired proclivity to consumption, and
many cases even of the actual incipient development of the
disease in the more northern sections of the United States,
and to a more limited yet appreciable extent even in this
section (where our winters are characterized by frequent
northeastern storms of rain, alternating with sharp north-
western winds), may have their terms of life greatly pro-
longed, and in a large proportion of cases escape a fatal
result from the disease, by a'permanent removal to, or a
residence for the entire cold season in, the State of Florida,
upon the principle already alluded to, and to a much greater
degree, and possibly to some extent to an additional cura
tive influence in the climate, is established by many well-
authenticated instances of such results, some of which the