BOVINE TUBERCULOSIS. 
19 » 
care for cattle, or be engaged in dairy work ; but as long as 
phthisical patients ignorantly spread the disease in all directions 
by allowing the sputum to fall in any locality where it may be 
converted into dust, such must be the case. It would be far bet¬ 
ter for the community, in my opinion, to isolate the patients 
themselves, than to allow their sputa to become thus dissemin¬ 
ated. 
The manure in tuberculous cattle plays exactly the same 
role as does the sputum in human, though there are cases 
enough where the alvine discharges of human beings are full of 
bacilli, and occasionally the urine. 
The bacilli being spore bearing and often practically inde¬ 
structible under natural conditions, may not the spreading of 
such discharges on fields be one way, and not an inconsiderable 
one by which the air contains tuberculous germs ? 
The most frequent form of tuberculosis is consumption of 
the lungs, and in persons affected with this disease, their sputa 
is loaded with the infective microbe, it having been proven that 
the expectoration in a single given case, contained more than 
four thousand million tubercle bacilli in a single day, while a 
single spit contained over sixty millions of them. In consider¬ 
ing the ways in which tubercle bacilli cause infection. Dr. SaD 
mon. Chief Government Inspector of Washington, D. C., places 
them in their order of frequency as follows : 
ist. By inhalation into the lungs. 
2d. By ingestion into the digestive tract in the milk of tu¬ 
berculous cows. 
3d. During coition, when the sexual organs are tuberculous. 
4th. From the tuberculous mother to the foetus of the in¬ 
fant. 
Eight cases of consumption occurring within a few months 
in an English convent were traced to a single case. There had 
been no isolation, but all had slept in the same general dormi¬ 
tory. Cornet found during twenty-five years in thirty-eight 
cloisters, 2099 nuns acting as nurses had died. Of these, 1300,. 
or sixty-three per cent., had died of tuberculosis. Prison con- 
