SCIENCE 



NEW YORK, OCTOBER 14, 



ON THE ABSENCE OF COWS-MILK FROM JAPAN; ITS 

 BENEFICIAL CONSEQUENCES.'- 



BY ALBERT S. ASHMEAD, M,D , NEW YORK. 



One of the most striking features of that most curious of coun- 

 tries, Japan, is the singular scarcity of domestic animals. There 

 yoii will never find the fields dotted with oxen or horses drawing 

 the plough; for the Japanese are hardly acquainted with that 

 time honored tool and symbol of agriculture. Even to serve 

 under the saddle does not come natural somehow to the Japanese 

 horse; "a grudging, ungenerous animal, trying to human patience, 

 with three movements (not by any mans to be confounded with 

 paces), a drag, a roll, and a scramble."^ Horses and cows are 

 only seen in cities, and on the roads as pack-animals ; there are 

 no pastures sweet. Silence is here really a striking magnificent 

 feature of the rus beatum. The cone-shaped mystic Fusiyama 

 rises, dimly seen, in the midst of an awful quietness. No lowing 

 herds wind o'er the lea; the barn-yard fowl's is almost a voice 

 clamantis in deserto. He reminds the farmer, but only in the 

 morning, that, even under these stagnant circumstances, time 

 flies. Here and there, however, a dog howls : that is all. 



The animal life of the land is set apart, concentrated, and taken 

 care of, as in a kind of common preserve, a general park or reser- 

 vation, in the interior of the land; where it browfees and prances 

 and bellows and reproduces itself, contaminating as little as pos- 

 sible that high type of eastern humanity which is now making 

 ready for the baptism of western civilization. 



But let me say, in passing, that what the European in Japanese 

 fields misses, I believe, more than anything else, is 

 "The music of those silver bells. 

 Falling at intervals upon the ear, 

 With cadence sweet. ' ' 

 I intend here only to speak of one of the consequences of this 

 quaint absence of animal features, of something not poetical at 

 all, but practical in the highest degree. The cow, in Japan, is 

 not wanted for her milk; otherwise she would lift her voice more 

 boldly in the landscape. Milk, being an animal product, falls 

 under the general condemnation which excludes everything that 

 has pertained to a living body from the alimentation of man. 

 Now, it is true this latter rule has a strange exception, for the 

 animals of the chase are eaten. Let us not shrug our shoulders 

 at the apparent inconsistency ; the Oriental mind understands 

 itself. Thus it happens that, as Japan may not use cow's milk, 

 the Japanese mothers are compelled by stress of circumstance to 

 suckle their babes themselves; and these delicate dwarfs have be- 

 come the most perfect, the most successful Almce Matres of the 

 world. 



Artificial lactation is altogether unknown. The children are 

 suckled until the sixth year, and you may hear them ask for the 

 breast in a language as correct as that of adults. But it must be 

 said that the mother's milk is not the only food of the little 

 Japanese. River fish enter for a large part into their diet ; after 

 the first year some other elements of general alimentation are 

 added to their bill of fare. But the mother's milk always remains 

 the ^jZai de resistance. 



Nature and society have endowed this notable mother with some 

 great and peculiar advantages. Here menstruation returns only 



> Head In the Section of Diseases of Children, at the forty-third annual 

 meeting ot the American Medical Association, held at Detroit, Mich., June, 

 1893. 



' Miss Bird, Unbeaten Tracks lu Japau. 



a year and a half after birth. Moreover, rules dating back to 

 time out of mind insure the young mother a long time of especial 

 attention on the part of the husband and her whole household. 

 The existence of the concubinate is also, strange as it may appear, 

 a considerable relief to the Japanese matrons. All that must tell 

 favorably on the health of the children. Even the infantile 

 minds find themselves in a wholesome, pleasant medium. No- 

 where are children so constantly, so lovingly taken care of. Japan, 

 it has been said, is the very paradise of childhood. Nowhere are 

 the adults so well qualified to enter into the nascent ideas of the 

 infant, to play with him ; for the nature of the Japanese contains 

 an extraordinary proportion of simplicity and childishness. 



The principal food of the mothers, besides the everlasting rice, 

 is fish, shells, sea-weeds, and other products of the sea. No wine 

 or beer enters into the diet of a lactating woman. The great re- 

 ward which Japan reaps from this meritorious care of mother- 

 hood and childhood is the absence of rachitism. All observers 

 have referred to the fact, and to the absence of rachitic pelves, 

 which is the consequence of it; hardly any difficult confinement, 

 and a very small percentage of deaths in child-birth. Now, I 

 think I am not wrong in affirming that the chief and central 

 source of these great sanitary blessings is the absence of cow's- 

 milk. 



It is a remarkable fact that Japan, which, according to Dr. 

 Brush,' ought to be exempt from tuberculosis, is very far from 

 being so. It is probably well known to you, that, according to 

 this observer, tuberculosis passes from the cattle into the human 

 organism. In Japan, this disease exists mainly in the upper 

 classes where, evidently cow's milk has nothing to do with it, 

 and, where it is easily explained by a systematic custom of close 

 inter-marriage, a system of, according to our ideas, incestuous 

 inbreeding, which has endured for many centuries; this is the 

 same process by which the disease is developed in cattle, accord- 

 ing to Dr. Brush. It seems, therefore, that there is no necessity 

 of transmission, and that the human organism worked upon by 

 the same causes will show the same effects. Strange to say, the 

 mountaineers, who havte the most intimate relation with the iso- 

 lated Japanese cattle, on their breeding ground, are practically 

 free from tuberculosis. There is also an historic fact which goes 

 much against Dr. Brush's theory; the cattle were introduced into 

 Japan, from China, in the third century, and tuberculosis is known 

 to have existed there in that same high-bred class from times im- 

 memorial. The aristocratic disease, tuberculosis, was certainly 

 communicated to the common people through a very extensive 

 concubinate; and I am equally convinced that it was the milk of 

 the mothers that preserved the lower orders from destruction. 



Thus it would appear that the absence of cow's milk, though 

 not a blessing in the sense of Dr. Brush, has had in another way 

 an exceedingly beneficial influence on the general health of the 

 race. 



Racial immunities, or the natural resistance of a race to cer- 

 tain diseases, are at least partly transmitted by the mother's 

 milk. It is thus, as I said, that this race is free from rachitism. 

 And there is another privilege of the same kind transmitted 

 through the milk to the suckling. The iodized sea-foods, more 

 especially sea-weeds and the fats and oils of fishes, which have 

 for so many centuries formed a considerable proportion of the 



3 See " The Relationship Esiating between Human and Bovine Tuberculo- 

 sis," by E. F. Brush, M.D., Mount Vernon, N. T. Read before the New York 

 Academy of Medicine AprU 18,1889 (V. Y. Med. Jour., June 15, 1889). Also 

 "On the Coiucideut Geographical Distribution of Tuberculosis and Dairy Cat- 

 tle,'' by E. P. Brush, M.D. Read before IheMedlcsil Society of the State of New 

 York at its eighty-fourth annual meetlug (.V. Y. i/ed. J.nir., March 8, 1890). 

 Also " Causanguineous Breeding lu its Relations to Scrofula and Tubercu- 

 losis," by E. F. Brush, M.D. Read before the Society of Medical Jurispru- 

 dence and State Medicine, March 10, 1890 (.V. Y. iled. Jour., June 28, 1890). 



