Tuberculosis and cow's milk : a criticism of the Royal Commission report / by Walter R. Hadwen.

  • Walter Hadwen
Date:
[1910?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Tuberculosis and cow's milk : a criticism of the Royal Commission report / by Walter R. Hadwen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    first place breathed. How, then, is this to be proved ? Rigut METHOD oF INVESTIGATION. There is but one way, namely, by post mortem examination. ‘The point would be to ascertain which part of the body was first attacked. If the glands of the abdomen were first attacked, they would prove to be much more advanced in disease than those in the chest; if the chest glands were the primary cause of the mischief, they would be much more advanced than those in the abdomen. The Com- missioners confess that the hospital records in their possession have been so inefficiently kept that this, the only satisfactory method of solving the problem of origin in each particular case of disease, cannot provide them with definite proof upon the subject ; and it strikes me that even if the patho- logical condition of these cases had been carefully noted, the evidence would still have been incomplete, for it is questionable whether the details of the environment of the patient, and of the food which had been partaken of and the source of the milk supply would have been carefully noted beforehand. Some nine years ago when a tremendous tuber- culosis scare was created, and when newspapers, birds, cats, mice, flies, were all charged with being purveyors of the dreaded tubercle bacillus—probably a very harmless creature after all—Sir William Broadbent made the alarming statement that 70,000 persons died annually in Great Britain from tuber- culous complaints contracted either from infected meat or infected milk. His conclusion rested upon the basis of statistics, which, if not carefully handled, may prove quite as misleading as experiments on living animals. Sir William Broadbent's statistics were culled en bloc from the Registrar General’s reports without any attempt to prove by post mortem
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