VETERINARY MEDICAL LEGISLATION. 
405 
It aims to promote this object by the detection of disease in 
its incipiency. 
And it is a fact well understood by the simplest novice that 
to accomplish this object requires the keen discrimination pos¬ 
sessed only by the “ expert ”—the qualified practitioner of veter¬ 
inary science. 
What are the evils said to be in existence ? 
They are diseases of a loathsome nature and of septic origin, 
many of them arising in the lower orders of animals, many of 
them carried by them to the household, and when once established 
there creating immeasurable suffering, frequently followed by 
death, the mortality, especially in our crowded tenement districts, 
at times assuming alarming proportions. Statistics exhibit these 
facts beyond question. 
Do they exist de facto, or in the imagination only ? 
In the scarlet fever epidemic in Keeswick, England, in July, 
1881, when some forty-odd cases appeared, the medical officer 
traced their cause to a dairy that supplied the affected families 
with milk. 
There are tabulated by Earnest Hart, fifty typhoid epidemics, 
fourteen of scarlet fever and seven of diphtheria, having their 
origin in the dairy. 
Friedberger reports to the Veterinary Society of Munich un¬ 
mistakable symptoms of croup and diphtheria witnessed in the 
domestic fowls. 
In the Medical Record , of this city, November 8, 1879, will 
be found a notice of a household where, five children being sick 
with diphtheria, three kittens took the disease and died. Dost 
mortem examination showed diphtheritic exudations in the throat. 
Illinois furnishes evidence of glanders extending to the human 
family. During the recent outbreak the health boards chronicled 
some fourteen cases of a malignant and loathsome nature, tending 
fatally. 
Several outbreaks of typhoid fever have been traced to the 
dairy, the recent epidemics in England, for example, furnishing 
positive evidence of the contagium through the milk supply from 
a dairy where the cans were washed in the water of a running 
