108 THE COMMON SENSE OF THE MILK QUESTION 



she takes it, more bacteria entering at every step. 

 Then, being a careful woman, she places it in the 

 ice-box alongside the tiny bit of ice, which does not 

 sufHce to cool the temperature in the box perceptibly 

 below that of the kitchen itself. Poor Mrs. Jones ! 

 she has not got a thermometer, and she would not 

 know its use if she had one. It would not help her 

 very much, therefore, if you told her that the tem- 

 perature in her ice-box is very comfortable for most 

 of the bacteria, being about seventy-five degrees 

 Fahrenheit.* After a little while the baby cries, 

 and you are horrified to see the filthy mixture given 

 to the little one in a bottle. Now you can understand 

 why Mrs. Jones lost her other two babies and why 

 this one looks ill. You can understand, too, her 

 fatalistic resignation to the fact that "Some folks 

 alius loses their babies in summer, 'cause they'm 

 built that way." 



VI 



All this is, of course, very terrible and exceedingly 

 painful. But it is by no means the worst that is 



* There was an outbreak of diarrhcEal disease in one of the 

 New York hospitals, which caused the authorities much worry. 

 The most careful investigation of the milk supply failed to 

 show anything wrong, and it was not until, in desperation and 

 as a last attempt to explain the epidemic, one of the physicians 

 placed a thermometer in the refrigerator that the cause was 

 discovered. Although apparently plentifully supplied with ice, 

 the " refrigerator " had a temperature of over seventy degrees 1 



