THIRTY-SIXTH ANNUAl^ CONVENTION. 53 



and the water seemed to be all right so they examined the milk 

 as it was delivered to him by the farmer he was getting his sup- 

 ply from, and they found the milk from one of these farmers 

 laden with the typhoid bacteria. They went to this farm and 

 everybody seemed well. It was run by a widow lady and her 

 children. The children said no one had typhoid fever and this 

 was true as far as they remembered. In speaking to the mother 

 about it she said she had had typhoid fever about eighteen years 

 before. They made a careful examination of her and found one 

 of those rare cases, but not the first one, where the human being, 

 after apparently getting over the typhoid fever was still a regu- 

 lar incubator for the typhoid germ and they kept developing and 

 multiplying in her system, and she was contaminating the milk. 

 When I related this circumstance to our Health Officer in Elgin, 

 when I got through, he stated that the previous summer, at the 

 Convention of Municipal Health Officials this same case had 

 been referred to by one of the officials at Washington, D. C, 

 and they at this convention, further referred to a celebrated case 

 in New York City of a woman effected this way. She was called 

 "Typhoid Mary." She was taken up and placed in one of the 

 hospitals to see if they could not drive this hot bed of bacteria 

 out of her, and just last week, I read in a New York news item 

 that "Typhoid Mary," after three years in a New York hospital, 

 had been pronounced free from the germ and released. Dust 

 from the sputem of diseased workmen in a carlessly conducted 

 stable was carried by a draught of air in the milk and a year or 

 so later a child dies of intestinal tuberculosis. The cause and 

 effect are widely separated from point of time and sometimes 

 distance, but the result is as direct and logical as the assassin's 

 deadly bullet. 



An example is given in one of the Government Bulletins of 

 a test made on milk of twelve cows in the same stable. The 

 milk from eleven of the cows showed a small bacteria count but 

 the milk from the twelfth cow showed a count of one hundred 

 thousand bacteria per centimeter. Investigation showed that the 

 twelfth cow stood next to a pile of ground feed, that every time 



