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provided the weather be cool, the milk reliable, and the use of the raw 
milk produces no digestive disturbance. During the summer it is 
better to pasteurize or to sterilize all milk used in infant feeding. All 
pasteurization and sterilization are, however, processes to be reserved 
for home use only. As a rule milk that has been commercially pas- 
teurized. or sterilized should not be used, as it may have been imper- 
fectly kept by the dealer after the process. 
Reasons for the sterilization and pasteurization of milk . — Apart 
from the safety the sterilization or the pasteurization of milk con- 
fers by virtue of the destruction of all its nonspore bearing bacteria 
(the word “ sterilization ” is not used here in the laboratory sense, 
but refers merely to measures which will destroy ordinary patho- 
genic organisms) there is abundant and incontrovertible evidence 
to show that by these measures both the morbidity and the mor- 
tality of infants from gastro-intestinal disease has been greatly 
reduced. 
There are also additional and important reasons in the case of 
infants of less than 3 months of age which render the steriliza- 
tion of the milk from their use especially desirable. Russell has 
shown that heating the milk destroys the tendency of the fat globules 
to coalesce and distributes them uniformly throughout the milk. 
This combined with the partial inhibition of the curding action of 
the gastric juices upon the casein of heated milk prevents the for- 
mation of large fat containing curds in the stomach. 
Now, the gastric capacity of young infants is both absolutely and 
relatively very small. During the act of nursing, when the stomach 
has been filled a portion of its contents is passed on into the duode- 
num. That this must take place is readily shown by consulting the 
records of Feer’s investigations and by comparing the amounts taken 
at single nursings with the absolute gastric capacity of infants of 
that age as determined by Pfaundler. 
The soft, flocculent, diffluent curd of heated milk readily permits 
this action to occur as the stomach reaches the point of physiological 
distension. 
Ob jections to the use of sterilized milk. — The use of sterilized milk 
for the feeding of infants has often been objected to, first, on account 
of supposedly greater difficulty in digestion, and second, because of 
the danger of producing infantile scurvy thereby. The first objection 
is founded upon misapprehension, as can readily be shown by com- 
paring the action of rennet ferment on raw milk and on milk that 
has been previously heated. The raw milk coagulates firmly, while 
the heated milk has a soft, almost diffluent clot. Moreover, careful 
investigations of the digestive absorption of the constituents of heated 
milk have shown evidence of a considerably greater degree of com- 
pleteness in such absoption than is the case in unheated milk. This, 
