The Lesson Denmark Taught with Calves 



Have you heard of Dr. Bang ? He freed Danish 

 cattle of tuberculosis in a simple way, which New 

 York City is now applying to poor, stricken children 



By A. M. Jungmann 



The babies at the Preventorium spend twenty-four hours in the open air. They are kept for 

 about four months, during which time every effort is made to correct the home conditions 



ONE of the most important steps ever 

 taken in preventive medicine is 

 directly attributable to the care 

 Denmark lavishes on her cows. Dr. Bang, 

 a Danish veterinary, whose task it was to 

 conserve cattle which were threatened 

 with extermination through the ravages of 

 tuberculosis, discovered that calves of 

 tubercular parentage are not necessarily 

 tubercular themselves. His course was 

 ob\ious. He simply took new-born calves 

 away from their tuberculous mothers and 

 fed them on sterilized milk from a bottle. 

 They grew up into healthy cows quite free 

 from tuberculosis. Since then Denmark 

 has adopted the Bang method of fighting 

 tuberculosis and freed her cattle from that 

 dread disease. 



How Children Are Saved by the New Plan 



Dr. Alfred F. Hess is responsible for the 

 application of Dr. Bang's method to New 

 York's children. Until the Tuberculosis 

 Preventorium for Children v.as opened at 

 Farmingdale, New Jersey, we neglected to 

 avail ourselves of the greatest weapon in 



the warfare against tuberculosis — that of 

 saving the children from the disease. 



Infants who become infected with tuber- 

 culosis when under one year of age rarely 

 recover, and those who contract the disease 

 between the ages of one and two years have 

 a very poor outlook. Young children who 

 are cared for by a consumptive mother or 

 who are in daily or hourly contact with a 

 consumptive father, can scarcely be ex- 

 pected to avoid infection. In conducting 

 an investigation of one hundred and twenty 

 homes wherein one or more of the adult 

 members of th.e family were suffering from 

 tuberculosis, Dr. Hess found forty-two 

 infants under two years of age. Without 

 exaggeration, that means forty-two infants 

 doomed to succumb from tuberculosis. In 

 many of the one hundred and twenty homes 

 two or more infants were exposed to it.- 



Instead of adopting Bang's method, 

 why not send away the tubercular member 

 of the family? That is not always practica- 

 ble. A mother cannot be spared from the 

 household, for the very reason that she has 

 an infant to care for as well as other chil- 



