BOVINE TUBERCULOSIS. 
87 
Dr. Iv. Emmett Holt, Professor of Diseases of Children in 
the New York Polyclinic, reports five cases of intra-uterine in¬ 
fection. Three of these were under two months old, one being 
but twenty days. The child who died on the twentieth day was 
born prematurely of a mother who was suffering from advanced 
tuberculosis. The child had cheesy bronchial glands, and mil¬ 
iary tubercles and small tuberculous nodules in the lungs. In 
one of the children dying at the age of seven weeks, cheesy 
nodules were found in the lungs and spleen. In the other dying 
at the same age, the mother had advanced tuberculosis, and died 
eleven days after the birth of the child. The autopsy showed 
an extensive tuberculosis pneumonia, with cheesy bronchial 
glands, and tuberculous deposits in the spleen, liver, intestines 
and mesenteric glands. Intra-uterine infection through the 
placental circulation has been demonstrated in the human race, 
by the cases of Birch-Hirschfeld Eehmann, Bar and Renon, and 
others. In Birch-Hirschfeld’s case the organs of a foetus taken 
from a woman dying from general tuberculosis were found to 
contain tubercle bacilli, and bacilli were also found in great 
numbers in the placental tufts. In Lehmann’s case there was 
tubercular lesions in the placenta as well as in the child’s or¬ 
gans. Bar and Renon made inoculations in guinea-pigs with 
the blood drawn in five different cases from the placental ex¬ 
tremity of the umbilical vein, where women with advanced tu¬ 
berculosis were delivered either of living or still-born children. 
The results of these injections were positive in two cases. Dr. 
Holt says “ In most of the cases where children die of tubercu¬ 
losis during the first two or three months of life I believe the 
probabilities to be strongly in favor of intra-uterine infection.” 
Waldeyer and Martin have shown proof positive that the 
bacillus is present in the greater circulation as seen in the local¬ 
ization of nodules in the liver, kidneys and testicles, therefore 
there can be no reason why they should not pass out of the ma¬ 
ternal placenta. 
Dr. Law in 1877 recognized the existence of tuberculosis in 
a large Jersey herd in New York. After all the animals had 
