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high throughout. This was the only fatal case. The second case
was that of the child's nurse. She was sent home showing signs
of fever, and was ill a long time. In the third case the child,
aged six years, had dysenteric straining of almost pure blood.
There was little constitutional disturbance, and the attack soon
yielded to treatment. The fourth case was that of a middle.aged
gentleman attacked with diarrhsea, which assumed a dysenteric
character, as many as twenty.five motions being passed in a day.
The attack, which left marked debility, lasted ten days. The next
case was that of an old nurse, who, ridiculing the idea of the milk
being the cause of illness, drank all that was left after tea one day,
and was rewarded with a violent diarrhsea that lasted a whole
week. Another case was that of a child (who, however, was
teething, and) who, after partaking of milk from the same source,
suffered during six or seven days under a severe dysenteric attack.
The seventh case was that of a lady, who after some days of bowel
irritation, was prostrated with acute dysentery which was long in
yielding and left great debility.
Upon enquiry being made of the dairyman who supplied the
affected families with milk, he acknowledged that two, if not three,
of his cows were “ng in their quarters”.e., they had diseased
udders; but he hoped that the small amount of bad milk
they yielded would .not be felt with the large quantity of good
milk with which it was mixed ! In each case the supply of milk
from that particular dairy was cut short, and as regards the
families interested, a limit was thus set to the endemic. But
what mischief, if any, was done in other directions does not
appear, and it is too late to enquire.
The other cases referred to were eleven of diarrhsea, which occurred
at about the same period of time. The milk supply was
derived in part from a dairy and in part from cows kept for private
use, the one point in common between the two sheds being that
“ tillers' wash " formed part of the food of the cows. There is
no history of any illness or disturbance of the secretion of the
cows themselves.
I regret that I had not an opportunity of investigating these
cases—and especially the first series—at the time of their occurrence,
as they might have thrown some light on an obscure but
very important, an increasingly important subject—viz., that of
disease in animals as a factor of disease in man. Professor Parkes
states, inter alia, that milk contaminated with pus from an inflamed
udder will give rise to stomatitis (inflammation of the mouth) in
children and to apthae (thrush) on the mucus membrane of the
lips and gums. But there is no mention of these symptoms in the
cases under review. Parkes also refers to the power of milk which
contains large quantities of the fungus Oidium lactis, or Pennicillium,
to produce dyspeptic symptoms, and even cholera.like attacks.
Gastric irritation and febrile gastritis are also enumerated among
the effects following the ingestion of impure milk.