IXTERCOMMUNICABILITY OF TUBERCULOSIS. 
815 
Although, as the law at present stands in all countries, it is 
impossible to prove the actual transmission from cattle to mail 
.experimentally* and although, as I have indicated, there are great 
difficulties in the way of ascertaining exactly the source of infection 
in any given case of acquired intestinal tuberculosis in a child, still 
there are scattered throughout medical and veterinary literature 
records of numbers of cases which, to the reasonable and scientific 
mind, leave no room whatever to doubt that the source of infection 
was cow’s milk. 1 will quote one of these reported by M. Auguste 
Olliver at a meeting of the Acadcmie do Medicine, 21th February, 
1S9L : — ‘'Two months previously lie had been called in to a girl aged 
twenty who was suffering from tubercular meningitis. Her parents 
were both robust, and she herself had had no previous illness to speak 
of, and lived under excellent hygienic conditions. She died from 
coma on 26th December, 1S90. The girl had been educated at a 
convent in Chat res, where within a few years tuberculosis had attacked 
twelve persons, five of whom had died. It appeared that on 26th 
November, 1889, the veterinary inspector had condemned the flesh of 
a cow between nine and ten years old which had been slaughtered that 
morning in the Chatrcs abattoir. The animal seemed to be in good 
condition, but there were tubercles in 1 lie lungs, peritoneum, and 
paunch, while the udder was completely stuffed with them. This cow 
had belonged to the convent where the patient had been educated, and 
its milk bad for nine years been consumed by the pupils and others 
in the house. Between October, 1887, and the date of the slaughter 
of the cow one of the pupils died of tuberculous peritonitis, one of 
general tuberculosis commencing in the mesenteric glands, and three 
of pulmonary phthisis. Another pupil developed tubercular disease 
of the elbow, and six others showed evident signs of tuberede of the 
lungs, but, on being removed from school and kept considerable periods 
in the country, recovered. In none of these cases was there any family 
history of tubercle.” 
Another case equally convincing is one of which I have personal 
knowledge, but which has not up to the present been published. 
The victim was a child fifteen months old. For some time previous to 
its death it was being attended by a medical man of my acquaint- 
ance for chronic diarrhoea, marasmus, &c. During his connection with 
the case it was ascertained that the child had been fed from a bottle 
with cow’s milk almost from its birth, on account of the poverty of its 
parents. The mother having to go to work every day at a local 
factory, the child was left, except at dinner hour and in the evenings, 
in charge of a neighbour. The cow’s milk was secured from a general 
dealer who lived near and kept two cows. Both these cows were intensely 
tuberculous, and were destroyed by order of the veterinary inspector 
two months before the child died. Both showed generalised tuber- 
culosis in an advanced stage, one having extensive . long-standing 
tubercular mammitis. No post-mortem examination of the child was 
made on account of the objection of the parents. But, having regard 
to the history of the case, its probable causation, the fact that there 
was no family taint, and the symptoms and character of the affection 
throughout, the medical man in attendance had no hesitation in coming 
to the conclusion that the child had died from “ intestinal tuberculosis,” 
and the case was reported to the borough medical officer as such. 
