SOCIETY MEETINGS. 
63 
“ I thank you, Mr. President and gentlemen, for the kind in¬ 
vitation to speak to you on such a broad and interesting 
subject as that of meat inspection, and will, therefore, try 
to say a few words on this vast subject. There is probably no 
one more qualified to point out its virtues and its faults than 
this honorable body gathered here to-night ; but if you will bear 
with me I will compare our system of meat inspection with 
that of Europe, and especially Germany, which I happen to 
know something about, and also state the rapid improvement 
that has been made in recent years in this country in this line. 
“ Meat inspection in this country has only a very recent his¬ 
tory, but one that we can be proud of. In the older countries 
of Europe, meat inspection has been in vogue for a long time, 
but it is only in the last fifteen years that it has received a 
thorough reorganization all over the world. In reality it first 
took a steady boom in the old country when pathology became 
established on a more thorough basis, and with our increased 
knowledge of contagious and infectious diseases, it became 
more defined ; for instance, the disease, tuberculosis, in years 
gone by was diagnosed as many different diseases, and it took 
many years to clearly demonstrate its infectiousness. Any one 
- who is especially interested in meat inspection and especially in 
pathology would be surprised to read the history of tuberculosis 
and to see in what a state of affairs pathology was before this 
disease was thoroughly demonstrated. We owe this to Robert 
Koch, who demonstrated the infection beyond a doubt. But 
before Koch, it was our veterinary profession that pointed out 
very clearly the infectiousness of tuberculosis. It took a man 
with a great deal of courage and personality to defy the medical 
men of that age, and to draw attention to their mistaken 
methods of investigation. This man was Professor Gerlach, 
who is well known to all of us. He was the first one to draw 
attention to the fact that tuberculosis is a distinct infectious 
disease ; and later, Dr. Robert Koch proved beyond the shadow 
of a doubt that tuberculosis is produced by a bacterium ; and 
after thoroughly demonstrating this on many hundreds of ani¬ 
mals it still took time for such men as Virchow to classify the 
many diseases which were confounded with tuberculosis ; and 
during this time the rapid strides that were made in the perfec¬ 
tion of the microscope and in the technique of bacteriology 
aided our profession to thoroughly become guardians of the 
public health. 
“ The inspection of meat is such a large subject and one of 
