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9
other disease than Typhoid Fever. There were some other important facti
which assisted to fix the outbreak upon this particular milk supply. First.
In particular streets, rows of houses, &c., the typhoid picked out as it were
the customers of the dairy, leaving the others free from attack. Secondly.
In the several families invaded there were only 25 per cent. in which only
one individual of a family was attacked. In the rest, the number of cases
in a family varied from 2 to 8, the average being a little over three cases
in a family. This is not a common feature of typhoid, except where all the
members of a family have been exposed to the same morbid influenceThirdly.
There was no instance in which two families occupying the same
house were attacked, except where both families used the same milk. Fourthly.
The attacks in families appeared to have a relation to the quantity of
milk consumed. Thus it was observed that, taking those over ten years of
age and adults, the females who habitually use more milk than the males,
constituted 69 per cent. of those attacked. I am not aware that under
ordinary circumstances typhoid shows any such decided preference for
the female sex. Several very remarkable illustrations of this relation came
to my knowledge. I shall here only mention two of them. In a family
consisting of father and mother, who never took milk at any time, two
servants and four children, all had typhoid except the father and mother,
the children commencing. In another family consisting of mother, two
servants, three girls, and a boy of 17, one of the girls and the boy took
milk porridge daily at breakfast; the other girls with the mother took
little milk comparatively. The servants, complaining that the beer was
sour, asked permission to have milk instead of beer. The girl and boy who
ate porridge and the two servants were alone attacked. I was told also of
another case in the person of a young lady whose family was supplied by
some other purveyor, but who fancied to drink daily a glass of milk from
the dairy in question. No one else in the house ever took this milk and
she alone suffered an attack of typhoid.
The question now came to be how the contagion of typhoid got into the
milk; for that it was in it and was distributed with it there was proof of so
absolute a nature that it could not be gainsaid. I do not propose to trouble
you with all the steps by which I arrived at the conclusion that it got into
it from a water tank upon the premises of the dairyman. The method of
investigation I used was one which is particularly applicable to difficult
problems in etiology; and, as to its application to this individual enquiry,
I may say that although the facts and arguments have been extensively