The so-called "pure" acid is applied to infected living tissues, especially to tuberculous sinuses or wounds, after scraping them, in order to destroy any part of the tuberculous material still remaining.
Of the dry antiseptics iodoform is constantly used in septic or tuberculous wounds, and it appears to have an inhibitory action on Bacillus tuberculosis.
By the discovery of the bacillus of tubercle, the physician has been enabled to piece together a long and varied list of maladies under several names, such as scrofula and lupus, many of them long suspected to be tuberculous, but now known to belong to the series.
The state institutions, each governed by a board of trustees, and all under the supervision of the state board of charity, include a state hospital at Tewksbury, for paupers (1866); a state farm at Bridgewater (1887) for paupers and petty criminals; the Lyman school for boys at Westboro, a reformatory for male criminals under fifteen years of age sentenced to imprisonment for terms less than life in connexion with which a very successful farm is maintained for the younger boys at Berlin; an industrial school for girls at Lancaster, also a reformatory school - a third reformatory school for boys was planned in 1909; a state sanatorium at Rutland for tuberculous patients (the first public hospital for such in the United States) and a hospital school at Canton for the care and instruction of crippled and deformed children.
Both these preparations should only be used in cases where it is possible to exclude any tuberculous foci, or by their action in breaking down protective fibrous tissues they may cause a quiescent lesion to become active.