2 THE DISEASES OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS. 



structions of Moses to the Jews have far more to do with certain 

 superstitions ideas of the cleanliness or uncleanliness of certain spe- 

 cies of animals as unfitting them for food than with any true 

 knowledge of their non-hygienic character. Enthusiastic but blind 

 worshipers have even gone so far as to assert that Moses must have 

 known that trichinae existed in pork, hence his forbidding its use 

 as food. But they do not stop to think that these parasites require 

 a microscope for their detection, an instrument which was not known 

 to man until thousands of years after the books of Moses were writ- 

 ten. That the flesh of diseased animals was unfit for human food 

 did not entirely escape the attention of the Israelitic legislator ; but 

 his restrictive utterances were limited to his own people. He tells 

 the chosen of the Lord that : " Ye shall not eat of anything that 

 dieth of itself ; thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is in thy 

 gates, that he may eat it j or thou may est sell it unto an alien j for 

 thou art an holy jpeojple unto the Lord thy GodP — See Deut. xiv, 21. 



Numerous passages, which command that all blood must be re- 

 moved from the body before using it, lead us to infer that all such 

 articles were to be well cooked before being eaten, and that raw or 

 underdone meats were an abomination to the Jews, as they should 

 be to all people. 



Plutarch asks : "Why is it that the priests of Jupiter are forbid- 

 den to touch raw flesh ? " And answers : " Raw flesh is no more a 

 living creation, and is unfit to eat. Cooking gives it another form." 



]^ot only is human life endangered by the consumption of prod- 

 ucts from previously diseased animals, or from the consumption of 

 improperly cooked flesh, but quite a number of animal diseases are 

 capable, by intentional or accidental means, of transmission to man. 

 Yirchow has said that " man is far more susceptible to infection 

 from animal diseases than the latter from similar diseases of man." 



TRICHINIASIS OF MAN AND ANIMALS. 



There is, perhaps, no one disease of our domestic animals which 

 enjoys a more sensational reputation, or which has been more thor- 

 oughly investigated, than the disease of swine caused by the parasite 

 trichina spiralis. There is none more worthy of the attention of the 

 public or the hygienist. Although the literature* treating upon 



* The American student will find the best compilation that exists on this subject in 

 the " Report on Trichinge and Trichinosis," Glazier. 1881. Published by the United 

 States Marine-Hospital Service. 



