596 SCARLET FEVER AND MILK. 
this country so that one half of those vaccinated are not in 
reality protected, seeing that 50 per cent, of all vaccinated 
persons present imperfect cicatrices, it is presumable that the 
“ordinary lymph” (not only the lymph used in certain parts 
of the country, but all the vaccine employed) has suffered 
from this inattention to the necessaries of safe vaccination. 
Instead, therefore, of insisting that when this imperfect lymph 
is passed through a healthy child, it becomes pure vaccine, 
identical with the virus derived from the cow, it would surely 
be better, scientifically more consistent, to return to the 
original source of vaccinia, and in place of employing the 
virus of spontaneous cowpox, which is found to act very 
severely, to use heifer lymph, which “has all the qualities of 
that of the spontaneous disease, except its too frequent 
acrimony.” By renewing vaccine lymph in this way, we 
admit that the lymph at present employed is imperfect, not 
in consequence of a continuous transmission through suc¬ 
cessive human generations, but that its efficacy has been 
impaired by its careless propagation in the human subject.— 
Edinburgh Medical Journal . 
SCARLET FEVER AND MILK. 
In his Annual Report for 1878 on the Dorking rural dis¬ 
trict, Mr. E. L. Jacob chronicles the following interesting 
facts : 
In the middle of the year there was a small, but alarming, 
outbreak of scarlet fever at High Ashurst, which is partly in 
the Dorking union and partly in the Reigate rural sanitary 
district. The first case appeared in a very mild and scarcely 
recognised form, on May 26th, in the family of G. J—, a 
farm labourer, some of whose children had lately had it in 
another part of the county, and had recently returned home. 
On May 29th an infant next door took it from contact 
with G. J—’s sick child. Between June 1st and 7th there 
were fifteen cases in three other distant houses, the inmates 
of which had not any communication with the infected houses 
or persons. They were all supplied with milk, however, 
from a private dairy, at which G. J— was cowman. He did 
not himself have the fever, and the milk was not taken 
into his cottage, but he had continued milking the cows 
during his child’s illness. On the whole, it seemed probable 
that the specific poison of the disease had thus found its 
way into the milk, and had given rise to the earliest cases 
in these three houses. It was noticed that several families 
