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disease is reported to their department they put down the name of the 

 milkman. Recently there were found fourteen cases of scarlet fever in 

 houses getting- milk from one man. So the Board of Health offered to 

 disinfect this man's place and all that was therein, including his cans, 

 pails, etc., and the clothes of workers. They burned all his tickets, 

 printed new ones, and gave orders to use the tickets only once. There 

 was no more scarlet fever among his customers. 



Why are we doctors so anxious about the milk supply? You know 

 in the last two hundred years the death rate has been steadily lessening 

 and the average length of life has been as steadily advancing. We live 

 now, on an average, twice as long as the people did two hundred years 

 ago. The death rate in Ontario in 1903 was only 13.4 per 1,000. But 

 there is one exception to all this, and that is infantile mortality. The 

 death rate of the young is little, if any, better than it was a century ago. 

 What is the cause of this? First, that infants in too many cases are not 

 nursed by their mothers. The baby nursed by its mother has fifteen 

 chances for life against the one chance of the baby fed in any other way, 

 and the reason that infants are not nursed by their mothers is largely 

 that mothers do not know what a difference this makes to the welfare of 

 the child. The second reason of the great infantile mortality is to be 

 found in the character of the milk supply. Clean milk is hard to get, and 

 infants do not thrive on dirty milk. You cannot be sure of getting pure 

 milk, unless you wake up and ask for it. 



I have visited dairies on the north, on the east, and on the west of 

 Toronto, and, while some of them are much better than others, I have not 

 yet found one that is what I would call clean. The hands, clothes, and 

 utensils are not as we would all like to see them, and I repeat that the 

 responsibility for this is chiefly with the consumer. We must ask for 

 clean milk, and we must not be willing to pay as much for dirty milk as 

 for clean. 



I will ask your permission to conclude by reading an extract on this 

 subject from the British Medical Journal: "Like so many other matters 

 affecting the welfare of children and determining, therefore, whether our 

 race is to deteriorate or improve, this (the clean milk problem) is largely 

 a woman's question. As the writer on the milk supply of towns truly 

 observes, 'One cannot repeat too often that with mothers and house- 

 keepers lies the handling of this national problem. Let them refuse to 

 deal in any shop without first visiting the farm or farms supplying that 

 shop.' This seems simple enough and not unreasonable to ask." 



If a few ladies in every town would take up the question, would 

 insist on their milkman telling them where the milk they give their chil- 

 dren comes from, and would give a day or two to visiting farms, we 

 believe, as far as the milkmen who supply the wealthier classes are con- 

 cerned, the problem would solve itself — we had almost said in a month. 

 And we do not believe that these ladies, having set their own milk supply 

 in order, would rest content until they had effected a like reform for the 

 milk supplied to the poor. It is really a question of supply and demand ; 



