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an outbreak in certain districts in London and at Hendon, enquiry
into which had led Mr. W. H. Power, Medical Inspector to
the Local Government Board, to believe that the disease might be
of bovine origin; and, after describing the symptoms of the cow
disease which was the supposed cause of the outbreak, I mentioned
that the services of Dr. Klein had been called in, and that
that gentleman was engaged in a study, at the Brown Institution,
of the pathology of the disease. Dr. Klein's report strongly
supports the views expressed by Mr. Power, which, moreover,
approved themselves to Dr. George Buchanan, the Medical Officer
to the Local Government Board, who in his report on the subject
remarks that:—
"In its own province, Dr. Klein's report is as important and interesting a.s
Mr. Power's, and its more immediate significance lies in the complete
harmony between the conclusions obtained from Mr. Power's etiological
researches, and the influences, as to communicability and other characters
of the Hendon cow-disease, that follow from pathological enquiry.
By the inoculation into calves, either directly of the discharges from
cow-ulcers, or indirectly of sub-cultures of those discharges artifically
prepared, Dr. Klein has succeeded in producing now local, now general
disease in the calf; disease having unmistakable affinities, under some
conditions, with the Hendon cow-disease; under other conditions, with
scarlatina in the human subject:—on the one hand, ulcers on the skin
of the calf anatomically identical with the ulcers on the teats of milch
cows; on the other hand, general disease in the calf, at first of inconspicuous
nature, but passing on to serious changes in the internal
organs, more particularly in the kidneys of the calf; the more characteristic
of these changes being anatomically identical with those
resulting in the human subject from the operation of the scarlatina
poison."
It may be added that Dr. Klein, after complete study of the
cow-disease, found that "as regards the feeding capacity of affected
animals—their milking power, and their body temperature, nothing
abnormal could be detected;" and herein lies a danger to the
public, inasmuch as it will be difficult to satisfy cowkeepers that
there can be anything serious the matter with cows in such circumstances;
so that they will be likely, until instructed and convinced,
to continue to mix and sell the milk of cows affected with the
specific contagious disease in question, in ordinary course of