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DISEASED PORK, AND MICROSCOPIC WORMS 
IN MAN. 
BY JOHN GAMGEE, 
PRINCIPAL OF THE NEW VETERINARY COLLEGE, EDINBURGH. 
D ID Moses know more about pigs than we do ? Was 
it a knowledge of the parasitic diseases common 
to man and swine winch led the father of the Jews to 
condemn pork as human food? Both questions can be 
answered in the negative ; and the apparently slender 
grounds on which pigs were first regarded as unclean are 
stated in the following verse: “And the swine, because it 
divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto 
you : ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch their dead 
carcase.** The wisdom of the Mosaic law can only be justly 
estimated with a knowledge of the accidents arising in warm 
countries from eating pork throughout long and hot periods of 
the year ; and there is no doubt that the direct evil results as 
manifested by human sickness led to the exclusion of pork 
from the list of Israelitish viands. The masses of measly pork 
which may be seen hanging from the butchers* stalls in 
Southern Europe prove that the long-legged swine which 
hunt the forests for acorns, and rove about to pick up all 
kinds of offal, are often unfit for human food ; and that they 
were so to no less extent in the land of Israel is probable. 
There are those who fancy that domesticity breeds disease — 
that improving the meat-producing powers and hastening the 
growth of our live stock renders it liable to disorders of a 
malignant type — no greater fallacy ! The parasitic maladies 
which are bred for man in the systems of the animals we 
eat are most common in the quadrupeds allowed to rove 
about in search of food, and which living amongst men 
and animals, have every opportunity of meeting with the 
germs of the worms which prey on them. The animalcules 
which burrow and breed in the human frame are not, as 
the ancients believed, the results of an agglomeration of un- 
healthy humours becoming vitalized when perfected in form. 
The advocates of the spontaneous generation theory are now 
few and far between, and the development of the lower forms 
of animal life in apparently inaccessible regions of the human 
vol. hi. — no. x. L 
