UNSUSPECTED POISONING BY MEAT AND MILK OF TUBERCULOUS ANIMALS. 671 
In the case of butcher meats, a professional examination 
when slaughtered, embracing the condition of the general 
health, and the state of all the viscera as well as the carcass, 
will be essential, and the current doctrine of sound meat with 
localized tuberculosis must be abandoned. Every municipality 
must have its own public abattoir, where alone its meat supplies 
must be butchered, and where every meat animal and every 
carcass must be systematically examined. Private slaughter 
houses, controlled by individual owners, afford endless oppor¬ 
tunities for the evasion of sanitary statutes, and ought to be 
abandoned as relics of an age when modern sanitary science 
was unknown. 
The question of dressed, canned and salted meats is one 
that must be carefully considered. It is quite evident that such 
products must come to us with a sufficient guarantee if allowed 
to compete with our home meats that have passed the municipal 
inspection. It is equally evident that no inspector, paid by the 
packer or canner, can fnrnish a certificate which will command 
public confidence. This inspector must be a government official 
who is entirely independent of the packers and who is in no 
way dependent on their good-will. 
Then again the existing method of furnishing government 
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inspectors at our great packing centres only, and thus giving a 
monopoly to the large operators cannot be long maintained in a 
country of equal rights and privileges. The most obvious cure 
for this evil is to make all packing establishments government 
institutions, where the small packer shall have equal privileges 
with large, and where all carcasses shall be subjected to the 
same scrutiny and all shall go out with the same guarantee. 
Such a proposition will doubtless be severely criticised both 
from the medical and economic standpoint. 
On the medical side it will be argued that if the toxins in 
the meat and milk were as injurious as represented we would 
see the evil results on every side, and that medical men would 
be universally cognizant of them. And yet do we not see 
clearly to-day much that was never suspected twenty, thirty, or 
