MILK FROM TUBERCULOUS COWS. 
131 
upon inoculation in small quantities ancl in feeding experi¬ 
ments carried out with every possible precaution, then 
restrictive measures must have a far wider scope, and be 
carried on from an entirely different standpoint than has here¬ 
tofore been considered necessary. 
It is familiar to most of us that little importance has been 
attached to this question—the danger of milk from tuberculous 
cows with no lesions of the udder—for the reason that many 
experiments have been made with negative results, and be¬ 
cause a priori reasoning would seem to indicate the absence 
of such danger; because tuberculosis is not a disease like an¬ 
thrax, in which the specific poison is to be found in all parts 
of the system and is carried from one place to another by the 
blood-stream. Koch’s assertion that the milk from cows af¬ 
fected with tuberculosis is dangerous only when the udder is 
involved, appears to be based upon theoretical considerations 
rather than practical work in this special direction. It has 
been widely accepted, however, and the weight of his name 
has caused the assertion to be repeated many times with but 
few attempts to verify its correctness. 
The increased attention that has been paid to the disease 
among cattle, and the suspicions that have been aroused that 
tuberculosis among the domestic animals is a more frequent 
cause of its appearance among men than has been supposed, 
have made a careful investigation of this point imperatively 
necessary. With the exception of a few successful experi¬ 
ments by Bollinger ( Deutsch . Zeit. f. Thiermed., Bd. XIV. S. 
264) and Bang ( Ibid ., Bd. n, S. 45, 1885), no evidence of great 
value is to be adduced. These authors, as well as Tschokke 
(quoted by Bollinger), bring out isolated cases showing suc¬ 
cessful inoculation experiments with the milk from tubercu¬ 
lous cows with no disease of the udders, but the experiments 
are so few in number that they cannot be accepted as furnish¬ 
ing more than a probability, and extremely critical persons 
might be justified in ascribing the results to contamination. 
Bang (Congres poar l'etude dc la Tuberculose, 1, p. 70, 1888) 
gives new results. Examining twenty-one cases of cows af¬ 
fected with general tuberculosis but with no signs of disease 
