Tuberculosis. 483 



action on the small rodents and pigs, utterly forbids the unproved 

 assumption that it is on the contrary harmless to man. 



If the object of the sanitarian were merely to delay a fatal re- 

 sult in his tuberculous patient, while he accepted the prevalence 

 of tuberculosis as inevitable for all future time, the acknowledged 

 lessened receptivity of the ox for the bacillus from man would 

 mean more and would be at least worthy of a hearing, but as the 

 extinction of a disease germ and its representative plague must 

 ever be the first object, any movement toward the preservation in 

 cattle of a germ which is deadly to man and much more so to 

 cattle, must be held as subversive of the prime purpose of sani- 

 tary work. This is true even if we allow, for the sake of argu- 

 ment, that only a few of the bovine bacilli are capable of danger- 

 ously colonizing the human body, and that special environment 

 is needful to allow of such successful colonization. On the other 

 hand the limited receptivity of the ox for the bacillus from man 

 is the greatest encouragement to active work to exterminate 

 tuberculosis from our herds. It is impossible to adopt in man 

 the summary measures that are so successful in the speedy stamp- 

 ing out of the plagues of the lower animals, so that tuberculosis 

 in the human family can only be eradicated by slow degrees, and 

 therefore there will long continue for our herds the danger from 

 the human side, but just so far as the susceptibility of cattle to 

 human tuberculosis is limited, in the same ratio are our hands 

 strengthened in effective work for the extinction of consumption 

 in our herds and for preserving their soundness after they have 

 once been purified. If they were to be reinfected by the presence 

 of any consumptive person we might well despair of success in 

 face of a wide prevalence of tuberculosis in man, but since it is 

 only exceptionally that cattle suffer from man, outbreaks coming 

 from this source can the more easily be taken care of. In this 

 view tuberculosis is approximated somewhat more closely to the 

 other bovine plagues (lung plague, rinderpest) which can be 

 stamped out with the greatest ease and certainty, so that as a 

 purely economic measure the argument for the speedy extinction 

 of tuberculosis in our herds is reenforced. 



TREATMENT OF TUBERCULOSIS. 



Like all deadly infectious diseases in the lower animals, tuber- 

 culosis is not to be profitably treated as a rule. In the case of 



