364 
JOHJNT M. PARKKR. 
pose if the results of laboratory experiments were only taken 
into consideration. The danger is principally confined to 
people having one cow for family use, or to children being 
fed with milk from a cow reserved for that purpose. 
In considering the direct hereditary transmission of tuber¬ 
culosis, I would call your attention to a case reported in the 
“Journal of Comparative Pathology” (March, 1892). The 
article goes on to say “ that in the body of a man who died 
of decimated tuberculosis of the pharynx, larynx, lungs, in¬ 
testine, kidneys, prostate and rectum, the vesiculse seminales 
were full of semen, which were found to be swarming with 
tubercle bacilli. The other genito-urinary organs were 
healthy.” (Br. Med. Jour.). 
This case is peculiarly interesting and instructive, and 
following in the same line, McFadyean reports a case of con¬ 
genital tuberculosis in a calf five days old in which sev¬ 
eral of the lymphatic glands “ were enlarged to the size of a 
large nut, and caseous toward the center. Some small nod¬ 
ules, the size of a pea, were seated in the liver substance it¬ 
self? and these were also in a state of caseous degeneration ; 
and on staining cover-glass preparations there was no diffi¬ 
culty in discovering tubercle bacilli.” 
That this mode of transmission of tuberculosis is uncom¬ 
mon, not to say rare, is shown by the fact that up to the pres¬ 
ent time there have been observed only six cases of indubita¬ 
ble congenital tuberculosis in the calf, that is to say, cases 
in which the possibility of the disease, having had an extra 
uterine origin, was excluded, and in which the exact nature 
of the lesions was established by the discovery of Koch’s 
bacilli in them. In three of these cases the lesions were dis¬ 
covered in the foetum infant; in the fourth, the calf was dead- 
born, and in the other two the animal was under fourteen 
days old. The writer goes on to say, “it is probably not 
wide of the mark to estimate the tuberculosis among dairy 
cows at three per cent., and yet we know from careful statis¬ 
tics, furnished by the large continental abattoirs, that the 
proportion of tuberculosis among calves under one month 
old does not exceed 1 in 70,000.” 
