Partll.J MILK INSPECTION. 75 



ized practically the entire milk supply downward. The results 

 from your own laboratories show that under the influence of 

 these minimum standards the average food value of Massa- 

 chusetts milk is undergoing a steady and noticeable change for 

 the worse. 



Standards of Healthfulness. 



When the dairy workers became conscious of the health 

 aspect of the milk question, they saw that chemical standards 

 had little relation to healthfulness. In the last decade of the 

 last century attention swung sharply to the tuberculin test as a 

 milk standard. Perhaps nowhere more vigorously than in 

 Massachusetts this test was urged as the important standard in 

 milk inspection. Experience gradually made clear that what- 

 ever the merits of the tuberculin test — and they are many — 

 there was little prospect that its use would soon become so 

 general as to offer any distinct protection to the public milk 

 supply. 



Partly on account of this failure of the tuberculin test, and 

 partly because we became conscious that the health of the con- 

 sumer was menaced by other diseases than tuberculosis, we 

 have turned to other means of protection. Beginning in 1893 

 and reaching significant proportions, about 1900 the certified 

 milk movement undertook to guarantee the healthfulness of 

 milk through a combination of tuberculin test and medical in- 

 spection of the persons coming in .contact with the milk. The 

 experience of twenty years has shown that this supervision is 

 fairly efficient, but at the same time too expensive to apply to 

 the general milk supply. 



About coincident with certified milk, pasteurized milk began 

 to be discussed. The early practices in pasteurized milk were 

 so unsatisfactory from the standpoint of the dealer, the con- 

 sumer and the sanitarian that the practice early fell into disre- 

 pute. Pasteurization, as I observed it in connection with city 

 milk supplies up to about 1900, may be fairly characterized as 

 a fraud. Starting at about 1900 with the work of Theobald 

 Smith and of Russell and Hastings, the pasteurization of milk 

 at 140° to 145° F. for thirty minutes marks a new era in milk 

 pasteurization. Gradually the students of milk hygiene have 



