HOME TKKATMENT AND 



After carefully studying the Leopold House 

 outbreak, where all the cases were from t 

 schools, I came to the conclusion that certainly 

 the disease was perpetuated owing to pencil con- 

 tamination. Yet my son remarked to me on tw< 

 occasions that he had carefully gone over the 

 dates on which the cases occurred, and that he 

 was positive there were two separate lines of 

 infection running, although he could not tr 

 them separately. I ordered the lads co be kept 

 from the two schools for some days to see if the 

 chain would be broken. After three days I was 

 able to report a complete and continued cessation 

 of the trouble. 



Following the same line of thought, I was led 

 to review the Village Home epidemic at the end 

 of 1904 and the beginning of 1905. I carefully 

 went over all the cases, tabulated them afresh, 

 with ages, school standards, and the cottages in 

 which they lived. This reinvestigation' brought 

 me firmly to the conclusion that the outbr< 

 did not arise from milk infection, but certainly 

 from pencil infection. The earlier patients were 

 drawn almost exclusively from the higher stan- 

 dards, consisting of older girls, while towards the 

 end of the epidemic the patients were almost 

 entirely among the little ones of four to eight 

 years of age. This proved that milk, therefore, 

 could not have been to blame, while pencil con- 



