MILK AND MEAT INSPECTION. 
405 
asked and answered ? And none will deny that on starting 
towards the goal of their respective professions one is as well 
educated as the other. While the great majority of physicians 
obtain their diplomas upon an attendance of two sessions at 
college, nearly all veterinary colleges demand, and compel, the 
students’ attendance at three or more sessions, and each of these 
sessions as long, or longer, than the sessions of medical 
colleges. More than that, a part of the veterinarian’s educa¬ 
tion is from the standpoint of comparative medicine, in the 
study of those diseases of man and animals which are com¬ 
municable one to the other ; and their effect upon the public 
health. 
Take tuberculosis (consumption); that disease so widely 
disseminated that probably no part of our country is free from 
it; and which affects nearly all warm-blooded animals, more 
particularly cattle and the human family. This disease until 
recently was classed as hereditary, but it is now proven by the 
best of authority to be not hereditary at all, but a purely con¬ 
tagious disease due wholly to the bacilli tuberculosis, discov¬ 
ered by Prof. Koch. 
You cannot have cpnsumption without tubercule bacilli, 
and they are taken into the system by the lungs through respi¬ 
ration, into the stomach with food and by actual inoculation ; 
they are given off from consumptive patients through the mouth, 
nose, bowels, vagina and milk. Infection through the air, 
breathing dust containing bacilli, is the most serious to deal 
with, while infection, from cow to man through the milk, is. 
particularly dangerous, especially when the udder itself is 
affected. 
Consumption causes one-fifth of the entire death rate of the 
civilized human family, and while statistics are not obtainable, 
the claim is made in some cases that 50 per cent, of our mature 
milch cows are affected with the disease in some form. Yet 
how many physicians study this one disease from the stand¬ 
point of comparative medicine, and would think of looking in 
the barn or the public dairy for the cause of infection of their 
