1909 MILK COMMISSION. 123 



of the first school; Von Behring, another eminent German scientist, is the chief 

 exponent of the second school. 



But the controversy has largely hinged on the statement of Koch in 1901. 

 When he discovered in 1882 that tuberculosis was caused by a germ, he also ex- 

 pressed the view that the bacilli were the same in the bovine and human species. 

 This was accepted as authoritative until Koch startled the scientific world in 1901 

 with the statement that the disease was different in man and cattle, and therefore 

 was rarely, if ever, communicable, and there was no need for preventing the use of 

 products of tuberculous animals for food. This was not so readily accepted. Instead, 

 the German and British Government both appointed commissions composed of their 

 leading scientific men to carry on independent enquiries. These commissions pro- 

 nounced against the Koch view. Of 56 different "cultures" examined by the Ger- 



Tuberculin-tested herd from which milk is sold profitably at five cents a quart. 



man Commission, 6, or over ten per cent, were held to be of bovine origin. Of 

 60 cases investigated by the British Commission, 14 were declared to be of bovine 

 origin. Invariably the cases were found among children. The British Commission 

 in its' Interim Eeport in 1907, the latest such utterance on the question, said: 



"There can be no doubt but that in a certain number of cases the tuberculosis 

 occurring in the human subject, especially in children, is the direct result of the 

 introduction into the human body of the bacillus' of bovine tuberculosis; but there 

 also can be no doubt that in the majority at least of these cases the bacillus is in- 

 troduced through cows' milk. Cows' milk containing bovine tubercle bacilli is 

 clearly a cause of tuberculosis and of fatal tuberculosis in man. Of the 60 cases 

 of human tuberculosis investigated by us, fourteen of the viruses belonged to Group 

 I., that is to say, contained the bovine bacillus. If, instead of taking all these sixty 

 cases, we confine ourselves to cases of tuberculosis in which the bacilli were appar- 

 ently introduced into the body by way of the alimentary canal, the proportion of 



