60° C. for sixty minutes appreciably weakens the immune bodies con- 
tained in it, and that the great mortality of infants in large cities 
has a direct relation to the use of cooked milk. He believes that the 
important point in infant feeding is to use milk in which the native 
antibodies are intact. He uses this as one of his arguments in advo- 
cating the use of formaldehyde to preserve milk. 
Friedel, Kutscher, and Meinicke,® 1904, working under Kobe’s 
direction, in Koch’s Institute /for Infectious Diseases, at Berlin, 
found as a result of numerous experiments that fresh raw milk con- 
tains bactericidal properties, similar to those of fresh blood serum, 
against the cholera vibrio. But no such property was found as far 
as the typhoid, paratyphoid, and dysentery bacilli, the organism of 
meat-poisoning, and B. coli are concerned. 
They found that fresh raw milk has a feeble property of restrain- 
ing the growth of the dysentery bacillus. This property is not de- 
stroyed by heating the milk to 60° C. for one hour, but is destroyed 
above 70° C. These investigators believed that this property of milk 
in question is a restraining action and not a bactericidal one, especi- 
ally in view of their dilution experiments. 
They found that the bactericidal property of milk, as far as the 
cholera organism is concerned, is weakened by heating the milk to 
60° C. and by the addition of hydrochloric acid, pepsin, and sputum. 
Knox and Schorer b find that neither raw nor pasteurized milk 
seems to exert any definite deterrent action upon the growth of the 
dysentery bacillus, and conclude that it is evident that the much 
talked of bactericidal action of milk is of little or no aid in maintaining 
the low count desired in a milk used in infant feeding. 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS. 
Judged by the number of colonies that develop upon agar plates, 
the bacteria in milk first diminish then increase in number. This 
so-cabed germicidal property of mdk occurs only in the fresh raw 
fluid. 
For the most part our work plainly shows that no actual reduction 
in the number of bacteria occurs. However, when compared with 
the controls a restraining action is evident. The phenomenon there- 
fore appears to resemble that of a weak antiseptic rather than that of 
a true germicide. 
a Untersuchungen iiber die bakteriziden und entwickelungshemm enden Wirkungen 
der rohen und der auf verscbiedene Temperaturen erwarmten Milch gegen iiber den 
oben gennanten Bakterien. Klinische Jahrbuch, vol. 13, 1904— 5, p. 328. 
6 Knox, J. H. Mason, and Schorer, Edwin H.: A study of hospital and dispensary 
milk in warm weather, with special reference to pasteurization. Arch, of Pediatrics, 
July, 1907. 
