MILK-BOENE DISEASES 149 



Later, over the telephone, the local management in- 

 formed us that nothing to equal it had ever been seen 

 in the office, and that "somebody would get into 

 trouble for putting the milk into a foul bottle." But 

 that, it is needless to add, would be of little benefit 

 to our baby or ourselves if we had given that poison- 

 ous, filthy liquid to the little one.* 



The responsibility of impure milk for a very large 

 proportion of infantile diarrhoeal diseases has already 

 been touched upon in a previous chapter. In bring- 

 ing to a close this catalogue of the perils attendant 

 upon the use of cow's milk, and closing this indict- 

 ment, of which I have barely sketched the evidence, 

 I desire only to add that epidemics and individual 

 cases of infection properly traced to the milk supply 

 constitute only a small part of the awful sum of dis- 

 ease for which impure and infected milk must be held 

 responsible. There are, it can scarcely be doubted, 

 many fatalities which are never recorded against im- 

 pure and infected milk. Countless baby graves might 

 be marked with the epitaph, "Slain by Foul Milk," 

 if we only knew the truth in every case — and had 



* I have since seen three samples of bottled milk, supplied 

 by three different companies, exactly like the one described 

 above. One of these was shown me by Inspector Burton in 

 the office of the Health Department, New York City. Mr. Bur- 

 ton discovered th3,t the creatures were maggots which breed in 

 decayed food. Their presence in the bottles points to unsani- 

 tary conditions in the cow barns, to carelessness in cleaning the 

 bottles, and to bottling the milk near where the feed is kept. 



