Lecturing on Wedcesday on "The Administrative Control
of Tuberculosis," Sir Richard Thorne Thorne, F.R.S., the medical officer of the Local Government Board—following on the lines of the warning already addressed by Sir William Broadbent, Sir William McCormac, and Sir Samuel Wilke to the County Council—carefully prepared the ground for an impeachment of the milk-can as the chief factor in infant mortality from tabes mesenterica. He showed that whereas the reduction in the death-rate from all forms of tubercular disease for all ages has been over 36 per cent. during the last thirty years, and over 8 per cent. for all ages for the form mentioned above, in the case of infants under one year of age there has been a large increase. Now, inasmuch as the infection in this form is communicated through the digestive tract, the presumption a priori is at least strongly to the discredit of milk as compared with meat, and this presump- tion is reinforced by the fact that a large sale of suspected foreign milk has grown up of late years. The tone of the address, while calculated in the main to rejoice the heart of the butcher, will hardly commend itself to vegetarians or dairymen. We are all for prohibiting the free importation of impure or suspected milk, but we trust that when Sir Richard delivers his address on the milk-supply as a source of tuber- cular infection, he will not advocate the adoption of those extravagantly elaborate household precautions dear to the medical "crank" of to-day, one of whom gravely pronounced the habit of keeping old boots in the bedroom to be a serious obstacle in the way of attaining longevity. The modern victims of " bacteriomania " justify the outburst of Frelerick the Great as he collared a runaway : "Confound the fellow ! Does he want to live for ever ? "
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